Salto LEGIC advant Cards Explained: Enterprise Credentials

A Salto LEGIC advant card is a LEGIC advant smart card that a SALTO Space access system uses as its credential, typically on enterprise or campus sites that have standardised on the LEGIC ecosystem. Salto encodes its SVN access data into a LEGIC advant application on the card, while other applications — payment, time and attendance, printing, transport — can live in their own segments on the same card.

This makes the Salto LEGIC advant card a multi-application credential rather than a single-purpose door card. The organisation runs one LEGIC advant card per person, and Salto is one of several applications riding on it, each isolated in its own key-protected segment.

Enterprises run Salto on LEGIC advant to consolidate many services onto one secure card while keeping each application's keys separate. LEGIC advant is a standards-based smart card supporting ISO/IEC 14443-A and ISO/IEC 15693 with an on-card file system, so a single card can host Salto door access alongside independently managed applications without any one application seeing another's keys.

The security case rests on LEGIC advant's open cryptography and certified silicon. LEGIC advant uses AES (128/256-bit) and 3DES with mutual authentication and secure message integrity, on chip silicon certified to Common Criteria EAL4+ by Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). For a campus that wants one card to do many jobs, that combination of multi-application structure and certified crypto is the draw.

LEGIC advant deployments are governed by LEGIC's Master-Token System-Control (MTSC). LEGIC describes the Master-Token as "a unique and uncopyable physical medium" that holds the authority over an installation and grants hierarchical rights to encode cards and configure readers "without the use of data and information in plain text." A LEGIC Security Module (SAM) in each reader or encoder enforces those rights.

For a Salto-on-LEGIC site, this means the ability to create or delete the Salto segment on a card is controlled by the Master-Token hierarchy, not by whoever has an encoder. Losing control of the Master-Token is the serious event on a LEGIC system — it is the root of authority — which is why LEGIC treats it as a physical, uncopyable object rather than a password.

A Salto LEGIC advant card cannot be cloned by copying its serial number. LEGIC advant protects each application with mutual authentication and diversified keys, and the silicon is Common Criteria EAL4+ certified, so the access data is never exposed in the clear the way a proximity card's number is. A cloned card would have to reproduce keys it never has access to.

The one caveat is generation. LEGIC's older LEGIC prime generation used a proprietary encryption scheme rather than open-standard AES, and LEGIC guides customers off prime and onto advant for exactly that reason. A Salto system encoded onto LEGIC advant is on the current, AES-based generation; a site still on LEGIC prime should plan a migration to advant.

The table contrasts a Salto LEGIC advant enterprise card with a standalone Salto AES-secured smart card, so an owner can see which fits.

A working Salto LEGIC advant card is provisioned under your organisation's LEGIC Master-Token and encoded with your SALTO Space keys, so it is not a credential an independent supplier can produce — the authority to write the Salto segment lives with your LEGIC Security Modules and Salto integrator. Security ID Systems does not offer a keyed Salto LEGIC advant card; additional cards come through Salto, LEGIC, or your integrator.

Where we help is the open-format layer around the deployment: enrollment blanks, serial-number cards for simple readers, and hotel or legacy cards for adjacent doors. Those are the formats below.