The FIS Nordic World Ski Championships take place every two years and attract world class athletes from around the globe to compete in more than 20 events. The 2011 World Championships were held from February 23 through March 6 in Oslo, Norway. Nearly 600 competitors from 50 countries took part in the Championships, which were viewed by over 270,000 ticket-paying spectators and more than 300,000 sports enthusiasts outside of the arena. With all of the attendees of the various ceremonies, more than 1.2 million visitors came to Oslo. In addition to the competitors, there were many support teams and volunteers, event officials and 1,600 media representatives from over 20 countries.

With such a large number of people involved, designing and implementing a security system presented a major challenge. In developing a physical access control system for the event, one of the primary concerns was avoiding long queues, which is a problem encountered at many large events. In addition, the Championships required the integration of an accreditation system into the overall security strategy. Finally, because of the size of the arena, the entire system had to be mobile and have the capability to be regularly updated through a wireless local area network.

After a lengthy bidding process, the FIS chose the Norway-based systems integrator Infratek Sikkerhet AS to provide a complete, custom-designed security system. Infratek is a market leader and full-range supplier for the building, operating and securing of critical infrastructure. “Infratek Security has been working with access control systems for several decades. We have also worked together with HID Global for nearly 20 years,” said Kenneth Furesund, Product Manager at Infratek. Infratek acted as a consultant for building secure access solutions and worked with HID to design a completely new and highly sophisticated access security system for the Oslo World Championships.

Through the HID Connect Partner Program, HID Global introduced Infratek to Smart Media Innovations (SMI) Ltd, the company responsible for the software component of the solution. SMI markets both hardware and software that adds a mobile dimension to an access control system, and its products are compatible with either Iclass 13.56 MHz or proximity-based 125 kHz systems to enable a range of mobile functions. Together with SMI and HID, Infratek developed a solution to meet the multiple needs of security, mobility and speed to avoid long queues.

A key component of the solution was HID Global’s contactless 13.56 MHz Iclass chip. This technology offered a significant leap forward in accreditation and access control solutions, and the speed of the system and advanced software helped Infratek provide a fast, secure accreditation process. HID Iclass smart card technology provided the event with a high security solution for mutual authentication between card and reader, encrypted data transfer, and 64-bit diversified keys for read/write capabilities.

“The integration and accreditation has been a great success for us because it has made the entire process easier,” said Trygve Lauritzen, Chief of Security for the Nordic World Ski Championships. “With the chip on the card, we have much more control of the whole process.”

The 1,000 A6-format identification cards that contained the HID Iclass chip carrying various levels of accreditation provided access to the different areas of the large ski park as well as to the transport system during the Championships. “We looked at a solution where we could be mobile using a PDA. On this system we used handheld devices from SMI, an HID Connect Partner that we were introduced to several years ago,” said Furesund. “The handheld devices from SMI ensured that the entire system was mobile and flexible.”

“The PDA allows me to be anywhere on the site; it is connected through a wireless network and gets synchronised every 15 minutes,” explained Geir Ove Foss, Project Engineer at Infratek. “Everyone who gets scanned also gets updated in the database. If there are a lot of people coming in, we can just send in more guards with the PDAs to scan people. The nice thing with a PDA is that I can check the person on the card with the person on the PDA to see if the identities match. If someone steals the card or manipulates the picture, I can check the PDA and see what’s wrong. The HID Iclass chip makes this possible.”

After successfully managing access control and accreditation at the Nordic World Ski Championships 2011, Infratek, together with its partners HID Global and SMI, intends to continue to refine the system so that future large events can take advantage of the sophisticated solution. The event in Oslo provides clear evidence of the benefits of collaboration in order to develop advanced solutions for complex access challenges, and the HID Connect Partner Program is one way of leveraging the benefits of such collaborations.