I do smartcards for a living (well I did, now I do it for crumbs) and have a little insight into them.
They're honestly pretty stout cards and don't break easily, I have run a couple through the wash and ridden for hours with one between my butt and my harley and it's worked fine. They're not too senstive to EM, the reason for the shield is mostly about presenting someone from cloning the RFID that's used for physical access (the wireless door reader).
The logical access stuff is pretty sweet, instead of having to hassle with a bunch of passwords for getting onto systems or secure web pages all you have to do is remember a short PIN (actually if they do fingerprint that substitutes for the PIN). Card access is pretty easy to integrate into standard windows infrastructure, if you use Vista/2008 it's built in and doesn't require any installations.
Oh, and the cards cost 8-12$ from the manufacturer.
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Date: 2008-11-06 07:49 am (UTC)They're honestly pretty stout cards and don't break easily, I have run a couple through the wash and ridden for hours with one between my butt and my harley and it's worked fine. They're not too senstive to EM, the reason for the shield is mostly about presenting someone from cloning the RFID that's used for physical access (the wireless door reader).
The logical access stuff is pretty sweet, instead of having to hassle with a bunch of passwords for getting onto systems or secure web pages all you have to do is remember a short PIN (actually if they do fingerprint that substitutes for the PIN). Card access is pretty easy to integrate into standard windows infrastructure, if you use Vista/2008 it's built in and doesn't require any installations.
Oh, and the cards cost 8-12$ from the manufacturer.