PSIA’s PKOC demonstrated at GSX 2024

The PSIA demonstrated its PKOC spec at GSX 2024, and some of the leading lock and physical access control (PACS) vendors were able to see PKOC in action. With commercially available readers, cards, and apps all relying on the open specification, PSIA showcased the technology's interoperability.

“It was gratifying to see all of the hard work of the PKOC technical committee come together at the demonstration at GSX 2024,” said David Bunzel, Executive Director of the PSIA, “Many new manufacturers and customers of the security industry were not only impressed, but discussing ways to include PKOC into their product lines and deployments.”

The simplicity of PKOC, ease of integration, and the significant advantage of asymmetric encryption were some of the drivers that were most interesting to the companies and customers who were able to see the demonstration.

“The commercial and security advantages of the asymmetric key based credential over traditional symmetric keys which we have been using for decades is finally attainable with the PKOC specification. A public key-based solution can not be underestimated in its value over traditional credential solutions. You now get security, availability, interoperability and purchasing options all in one,” says John Cassise, Chairman of the PSIA’s PKOC Work Group, and Chief Product Officer, SAFR at RealNetworks. “While changing from traditional access control products is never easy, the vulnerabilities they have, make more robust solutions, like PKOC, an obvious choice for security, and a more flexible choice for the future.”

The PKOC specification leverages the concept of PKI without the need for the typical complex, expensive identity Infrastructure necessary for PKI. PKOC uses the device itself to generate the private & public key pair, (known as Keygen) enabling the private-public key handshake to authenticate the credential.

The beauty of PKOC is that the private key never leaves the device, and the public key becomes the “badge #” which can be easily shared with any system or device used to control access. With PKOC the USER literally “owns” the encryption keys and does not require any complicated process for managing or sharing keys. Furthermore, PKOC enables you to “Bring Your Own Credential” (BYOC).