The Security Industry Association (SIA) on Tuesday announced that it has released version 2.2 of the SIA Open Supervised Device Protocol (OSDP), an access control communications standard developed to improve interoperability among access control and security products.
According to SIA, version 2.2 features the messages and formatting that were included in the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 60839-11-5 standard released earlier in 2020 and also addresses some of the minor errata within that document. Version 2.2 replaces version 2.1.7 of the specification, which was released in 2015.
Chief among the updates are an enhanced method for file transfer, which allows for the transfer of large data sets for firmware updates or graphics from an access control unit to a reader, clearer instructions for the implementation of SecureChannel to facilitate encrypted communications and updated messages for handling smartcard applications within the protocol.
Additionally, SIA said version 2.2 is a bridge that allows for easier updates of the OSDP specification and the subsequent publishing of these enhancements as an international standard.
“SIA OSDP version 2.2 is a culmination of all of the work done over the past five years to prepare the protocol for international standardization and fixes the majority of common implementation challenges faced by implementers of version 2.1.7,” said Steve Rogers, Co-Chair of the SIA OSDP Working Group and President at IQ Devices.
In April, SIA introduced SIA OSDP Verified, a comprehensive testing program that validates a device’s conformance to the standard and related performance protocols. Maintained and developed by the SIA OSDP Working Group since 2011, OSDP was approved by the IEC technical committee on alarm and electronic security systems as an international standard in June.
OSDP v2.2 aims to duplicate the contents and terminology that were required in the IEC standardization process, harmonizing the SIA published protocol series and the IEC standard. SIA said that future versions of OSDP will continue to follow the IEC formatting conventions, enabling the always-evolving work of the SIA SODP Working Group to be more easily adopted through the IEC standards process.
