Terms used across this help center.
Access control system – the system your organisation uses to decide who may open which doors. IDEX cards are added to it as credentials, like any other card.
Biometric template – the mathematical representation of a fingerprint stored on the card. It is not an image, and it cannot be read out of the card.
DESFire – MIFARE DESFire, the contactless smart card technology widely used by physical access systems. IDEX cards carry DESFire applications that your organisation encodes with its own credential data.
Enrolment – capturing a fingerprint and storing its template on the card.
Enrolment station – IDEX equipment for centralised, supervised enrolment: an operator verifies a person's identity, then enrols them. See: Centralised enrolment – enrolment station.
FIDO2 / WebAuthn – open standards for passwordless, phishing-resistant sign-in. The card acts as a FIDO2 security key: each service you register it with gets its own key pair, and nothing is shared between services.
NFC – the short-range radio technology the card uses to talk to phones and readers. The card must be held to the reader or phone for anything to happen.
Passkey – a FIDO2 credential. Registering the card with a service creates a passkey for that service, held on the card.
PIN – the PIN the user sets on the card at first use. It protects enrolment and re-enrolment on self-enrolled cards and, on cards with FIDO, must be in place before the card can be registered with a service. It cannot be recovered, and too many wrong attempts block the card permanently. It does not open doors. For signing in it is the fallback when the fingerprint cannot be verified.
Secure element – the tamper-resistant chip on the card where the fingerprint template and cryptographic keys live. Neither ever leaves it.