Tech Systems Inc. (TSi) joins PSIA Board

As the security industry continues to experience a convergence of logical and physical security, TSi is committed to being at the forefront of this conversation. As a result, the company is fully engaging with the Physical Security Interoperability Alliance (PSIA) and its members.

“We are excited to be part of PSIA’s mission and look forward to collaborating with clients, vendors, and yes, even competitors. When our industry works together, everyone wins. As they say, “A high tide raises all boats,” said Wayne Smith, owner and president of TSi.

“PSIA's goal of a plug-and-play environment for logical and physical security aligns perfectly with what we see for the future,” noted Smith. “Specifically, TSi is looking forward to contributing to the emerging standards of the Public Key Open Credential (PKOC) project. By bringing the industries brightest minds together under one umbrella, we can accomplish much more through collaboration than we can individually. We look forward to contributing to the PKOC initiative and this necessary evolution for the security industry.”

PKOC creates truly secure and interoperable credentials. The commercial and security advantages of the asymmetric key-based credential over traditional symmetric keys, which have been used for decades, are finally attainable with the PKOC standard.

“We are excited to have TSi back as a strong advocate for the PKOC initiative,” said David Bunzel, Executive Director of the PSIA. “Having an integrator's perspective and also the voice of the customer is critical to achieving market acceptance for our specifications. In addition, we expect TSi to become an important part of our PKOC Connect Program.” 

PKOC Connect will be a program to provide resources necessary for integrators, consultants, and customers to better understand vendors with PKOC enabled in their products and also best practices to successfully implement the specification.

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 and 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).

The PKOC Bluetooth 3.0 spec is now available at this link.