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We just moved office last week to much larger premises!

Whilst our office building already has excellent security as it houses a credit union, an additional security layer for our office floor can’t hurt (this is unrelated to our servers; they are housed in the secure Global Switch data centre). Now sure, we could easily just get a commercial off the shelf alarm system and be done with it, but it can be pretty fun and interesting to get your hands dirty and do a bit of DIY hacking.

Using some simple components, we can quickly and easily build a basic RFID security system. One of the advantages of doing it ourselves (besides the fun!) is that we can integrate it into our standard monitoring and internal chat systems. The parts list for this project come from the excellent Australian electronics store Little Bird Electronics. The parts:

• Freetronics TwentyTen (Arduino compatible)
• Ethernet Shield with PoE
• Power over Ethernet injector
• RFID module
• Passive Infra-red Detector
• Misc parts like a power supply, LEDs, buzzer

UPDATE 7th March 2011:

We thought it would be good to re-use the proximity cards we already carry around with us for this project, but we couldn’t get any of them to work with this reader.  There are a lot of proprietary standards out there and documentation on compatibility is really quite poor.  We are currently sourcing another reader that can handle a wider range of 125kHz proximity cards.

For the curious, Indala FlexCard cards by HID Global use a totally proprietary air interface.

Whilst doing some research, an awesome open source hackers RFID module, the Proxmark3 was discovered. A very nice learning tool.

More posts to follow with details as the project progresses…