Electronic Control Access: A passing trend or a new standard?

Electronic control access has been getting more and more popular with each passing year. From hotels to company offices, cars as well as private domiciles everyone seems eager to adopt the newest type of locking mechanism available, replacing the older “traditional” locks and keys. The main alternatives are Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID), Magnetic stripe (Magstripe), as well as biometrics such as fingerprints. All of these alternatives are examined, from the technical aspects of their inner workings, implementations, potential avenues for attacks and exploitation, focusing on the ways of circumventing these control access mechanisms (opposed to the exploits to the databases etc.) and as well as some proposed solutions to these attacks and exploits. As in most cases when it comes to security in general, there rarely exists an all encompassing solution, rather there are tradeoffs between these three electronic and the mechanical options, and the best one is highly case dependent. Nevertheless, these tradeoffs are compared and discussed to give the best possible representation of each of the control access mechanisms.