Avigilon Alta (Openpath) Cards Explained: Credentials & Compatibility

Avigilon Alta is a cloud-based access-control platform, and yes — it is the product formerly sold as Openpath. Openpath was acquired into Motorola Solutions and rebranded under the Avigilon Alta name, and the old openpath.com address now redirects to avigilon.com. If your building was installed as an Openpath system, it is an Avigilon Alta system today; the credentials and readers are the same lineage.

As a cloud platform, Avigilon Alta manages doors, users, and credentials from a web console rather than an on-premise server, and it supports a mix of credential types at the same reader. That flexibility — phone, card, fob, or PIN — is central to how the system is positioned, and it shapes what you can and cannot buy from a third party.

Avigilon Alta supports several credential types at once: mobile credentials on a phone or smartwatch, high-security smart keycards and fobs, existing proximity and 13.56 MHz cards, PINs, and other factors listed on Avigilon's credentials page. This range is deliberate — it lets a site adopt Alta without throwing away the cards already in people's wallets on day one.

For new high-security credentials, Avigilon points customers to its own keycards and fobs and to mobile access. For existing cards, Alta's multi-technology readers are designed to read the legacy proximity and smart cards a building already uses. That combination — read what you have, issue what's secure — is the practical backbone of an Alta deployment.

Triple Unlock is Avigilon Alta's patented mobile-unlock technology. Avigilon states that Triple Unlock "uses three signals to unlock doors with 99.9% reliability" — the claim being that combining multiple radio paths between phone and reader makes the unlock more dependable than a single Bluetooth connection, which can be slow or miss on a first try.

It is worth being precise about what is documented. Avigilon publicly describes Triple Unlock as using three signals and cites the 99.9% reliability figure, but does not, on its credentials pages, name the exact three radios involved. The takeaway a buyer can rely on is the vendor's own framing: Triple Unlock is positioned as a more reliable mobile unlock than Bluetooth-only systems, and reliability — not just security — is the selling point.

Avigilon's high-security keycards and fobs are AES-secured 13.56 MHz contactless smart cards — the modern, encrypted class of access credential rather than a copyable proximity card. Avigilon's own marketing goes further, inviting customers to "secure your Avigilon system with virtually unclonable" keycards and fobs. That "virtually unclonable" phrasing is Avigilon's, and it reflects the general strength of an AES-secured smart credential over legacy proximity.

One honest caveat: Avigilon's public credential pages lead with the security claim rather than detailed chip specifications, and do not print a specific frequency, encryption bit length, or chip generation. So the accurate statement is that Alta's high-security cards belong to the AES-secured 13.56 MHz smart-card class and are described by Avigilon as virtually unclonable — not that any particular published spec sheet backs a numeric figure. For a card at a door, that class of credential defeats the copy-the-number attack that breaks proximity cards.

In most cases, yes. Avigilon Alta's multi-technology readers are built to read existing proximity and 13.56 MHz cards alongside mobile and high-security credentials, so a building can move to Alta without re-badging everyone at once. That is the standard migration pattern: install Alta readers, keep current cards working, then issue mobile or high-security keycards over time.

The most common legacy credential at a door is a 125 kHz proximity card — an open format with a fixed number and no encryption. Those are exactly the formats an Alta multi-technology reader can accept during a transition, and exactly the formats a third party like Security ID Systems can legitimately supply as compatible credentials while a site's secure rollout finishes.

Avigilon Alta's own high-security keycards, fobs, and mobile credentials are sourced through Avigilon and its channel — they are cryptographically bound to your system, so no third party produces a "compatible" Alta smart card, and Security ID Systems does not offer one. Where we help is the open formats an Alta multi-technology reader still accepts during migration.

If your site runs 125 kHz proximity on some doors, or an Avigilon-format proximity credential, those we encode as fully compatible cards that read identically on your existing readers. They cover the openings that are not yet on secure mobile or smart credentials, without touching the parts of the system that must stay on Avigilon.