Access control system in campus combining RFID and biometric based smart card technologies

Abstract

For universities where security is primordial and accessing to certain areas must be checked, an access control system should be used in order to enhance security in general and to reduce time-consuming in access control of an important number of candidates in the same time. RFID and smart cards are widely used technologies; RFID guarantees a simultaneous reading of the identified objects and the smartcards offer a storage capacity and enable processing information. Several problems of security remain still unresolved for both RFID and smart card used separately. We present in this paper a solution of access control, which combines specific identification and authentication technologies with synchronous and asynchronous data processing. In our case, we target the academic context. We demonstrate by two use cases how much the system security could be improved by combining RFID and Smartcards in a complementary way. For this purpose, the design of our system focuses in the first scenario on performing the verification of the presence of students in exams by using both synchronous and asynchronous techniques based on the coupling of RFID and smart card technologies. The second scenario focuses on the security of accessing sensitive areas by providing a synchronous verification method requiring immediate validation of the access based on RFID technology and the fingerprint of staff. Further technologies are also used to ensure accurate authentication, such as cameras and liveness sensors.