Access Control Industry Best Practices

Recent questions have been raised about the vulnerabilities of physical access control systems. Unfortunately, some critics, with limited familiarity of the security industry, have oversimplified the tradeoffs between conveniences versus security of access control systems. Some have actually sensationalized these accounts and even worse, some have not presented the facts in an accurate manner. One positive benefit of this is to increase the awareness of the need for a set of "Best Practices" to mitigate the risks of some of these "Theoretical" attacks. This paper focuses on the best practices that should be followed when choosing and installing access control readers. The audience for this paper includes system integrators, consultants, architects and engineers and the end-users of access control systems.