Mul-T-Lock SMARTair Cards Explained: Modes & Security

Mul-T-Lock SMARTair is ASSA ABLOY's wireless electronic access-control system, supplied through Mul-T-Lock. It uses battery-powered locks and readers — the i-max is a common SMARTair locking device — to bring electronic access to doors without the wiring of a full online system. Access is carried on 13.56 MHz credentials or, increasingly, on Openow mobile keys.

SMARTair is positioned for offices, education, healthcare and similar commercial sites rather than hotels. Its appeal is that it retrofits electronic control onto existing door hardware, and lets an operator revoke a lost credential and audit door use without running cable to every opening. The credential technology and the management mode are the two choices that define a SMARTair deployment.

SMARTair runs in three management modes. In Standalone, locks are programmed directly with a management card or tool for small sites. In Update on Card, offline management is distributed through the credential itself: rights are written to the card at online wall updaters and carried to battery-powered offline locks. In Wireless Online, locks communicate live with the management software (TS1000) for real-time control.

Update on Card is the mode that makes SMARTair efficient at scale. Because the card carries its own updated permissions and revocation data to each offline lock, a site avoids wiring every door while still propagating changes — a lost credential is blacklisted at the updater and the block travels to the locks on other users' cards. It is the same distributed idea that lets wireless systems stay current without a full online network.

SMARTair credentials are encrypted, and the high-security option is an AES-secured 13.56 MHz smart card. ASSA ABLOY offers SMARTair encrypted credentials across the standard secure RFID technologies, so a deployment can run an AES-secured smart card whose access data is protected by mutual authentication with per-card diversified keys rather than exposed as a plain serial number.

As with any RFID system, the security depends on which credential a site actually issues. A SMARTair estate running an AES-secured smart card is resistant to serial-number cloning; one still running an older, non-secure card is not. The move that matters is choosing the encrypted AES-secured credential — the system supports it, so the security question is really a provisioning choice.

Yes — that is the core design of SMARTair. Its Update-on-Card mode lets battery-powered offline locks stay current without any door wiring, because the credential carries permission and blacklist updates from online wall updaters to each lock. Only the updaters need to be online; the locks themselves run on batteries and are updated by the cards that touch them.

A site can also add Wireless Online locks where real-time control is needed — an external door, a high-turnover area — and mix them with Update-on-Card locks elsewhere. This lets an operator spend the wiring and hub budget only where live control is worth it, while the rest of the estate runs on the distributed card-update model.

The table summarises the SMARTair credential and management choices that define a deployment.

An encrypted SMARTair credential is encoded with your system's keys through the SMARTair management software and Mul-T-Lock's tooling, so a genuinely compatible high-security SMARTair card is not something an independent supplier can produce. Security ID Systems does not offer a keyed SMARTair credential; additional encrypted cards and Openow mobile keys come from Mul-T-Lock or your integrator.

What we supply are the open and hotel-card formats used around ASSA ABLOY and adjacent estates — serial-number cards for simple readers and hotel cards for adjacent doors. Those are the formats below.