Common Credential Systems, LLC

Common Pass

The high cost of cheating...

The PIV card provides 16 decimal digits that are required to uniquely identify a card. Because older access control panels cannot accept this many digits, some planners are tempted to “cheat” by using only a subset of the digits—but there are serious pitfalls that may not be obvious. If all the digits are not used, then there will be other cards out there that, to your system, appear to be the same card. For example, if your PIV card unique ID is 76543890123456, but you use partial codes to get-by using your Wiegand-26 system, then your card appears to the system as number 23456. This means that there are 999,999,999 other valid cards out there that look exactly the same to your system! Card number 11111111123456 will open your doors as if it was your own, and your system will never know the difference. In fact, if you have 6500 employees enrolled, one out of every TEN total strangers can open one or more of your doors with their PIV cards.

Worse than that, if you have 6500 employees enrolled, then one in TEN new PIV-carrying employees simply CANNOT be enrolled at all. Their card numbers will collide with numbers already in the database, and you can’t simply select a new number for them to avoid the problem like you could with the old cards.

 

 

8918 Tesoro Dr Suite 103

San Antonio, Texas 78217

To contact us:

Phone: 210-745-2710

Fax: 210-579-1057

E-mail: info@commonpass.com

“Cheating” by using only a subset of the PIV card data is an old trick that worked with other card types in the past, because a card that collides could be discarded in favor of one that does not. But PIV card numbers are fixed and cannot be simply discarded, making cards that collide impossible to enroll. Many planners have failed to see this pitfall!