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Rosebank College

Rosebank College was looking to improve student access control as well as barrier control on its premises. Limtech Biometric Solutions was approached and came up with a solution comprising five full-height bi-directional turnstiles; 10 biometric/smartcard combination clocking points (five x entry and five x exit); and 3500 smartcards containing student info and embedded fingerprints.

Shortfalls of existing system and requirements and concerns

Rosebank College had no control over persons accessing the campus as there was very limited physical barrier control available on campus to prevent unauthorised access. This resulted in unregistered students were lectures without paying any fees and the college had no control over these unregistered students. There was also no means of preventing registered students, who have not paid their fees, from gaining access to the college.

Limtech did a full on-site evaluation of the current set up and made the following recommendations and system implementations:

* Biometric fingerprint clocking points with smartcard interface would provide authentic staff clocking and produce accurate log data for reporting on restricted entry/exit.

* The BioSmart clocking system was recommended for easy clocking of students and assisting with the system education concerns as it provides two-factor authentication with smartcard and fingerprint combination; an unlimited number of users can gain access to each and every reader; a black-listing functionality is available to temporarily prohibit access when required; and visual LED indicators and audible sounds also provide user assistance for successful or unsuccessful clockings.

* Intelligent controllers were installed to provide anti-passback functionality to prevent students from clocking their friends into the campus, ie, each student must clock out on one of the five exit readers before they can clock in again on any one of the five entry readers.

* Each BioSmart reader has the capacity to black-list 4000 user cards at any one time. This means that administration at the college is able to temporarily prohibit registered students who have not paid their fees, from gaining access to the campus. As soon as the fees are paid, the black-listing can be removed and the student has access again.

* The BioSmart clocking system has Ethernet functionality providing a complete fully networked solution, which plugs simply into the current IT infrastructure at Rosebank College. Rosebank College IT department assigned Limtech an IP range on their network that, together with assistance from their IT manager, ensured a smooth integration with no impact on the existing network.

* Weather protection over the turnstiles affords protection for students when clocking, and protective hoods over the readers provides protection for the readers during harsh conditions.

Biometric systems on their own may be enough to prove an individual's identity, but having a smartcard which supports existing authentication infrastructures and has the ability to compare the biometric at the interaction point, allows for a much more flexible authentication identity with little impact on privacy.

A combined smartcard and biometric system provides the highest security, supporting two-factor authentication.

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