In mid-November, The Comenian informed the Moravian administration that the swipe access system was allowing some students to enter buildings they should not have access to.
In addition, as of Aug. 8 physical, plastic IDs were to be disabled for students who had activated their digital ID, giving them only one swipeable form of identification. However, some of those physical IDs continued to work, allowing students to temporarily use both their physical and digital IDs.
Once informed of the security risk, administration and IT began investigating the system to verify if such unauthorized access had occurred, which it had.
The administration promptly opened a priority ticket with Transact, the software company that oversees swipe access, and worked closely with the manufacturer’s senior technicians and developers to address the issue.
According to Dean of Students Nicole Loyd, providing swipe access to dorms is done through an automatic system rather than by someone manually altering who has access to specific buildings. Student Life staff maintain a list of where students live on campus; the card access system imports and automatically adds/removes names on that list – and student access to buildings – as necessary.
The lists are updated multiple times per day.
“When someone swipes their card/phone at a door, the device that controls that building checks if that individual is on the list of people with permission to open that door,” Loyd said. “In every case we checked, the students were assigned the correct access levels based on their residence [on Moravian’s side].”
A glitch in that system was discovered after Comenian reporter Lyana Cintron ‘26 found that she still had swipe access to Main Hall, her dorm building on South Campus last year, despite her living in a Hillside on North Campus this year.
The Comenian learned that multiple students had likewise retained swipe access to buildings that should have expired, including past residents of Main Hall, Jo Smith, and Hurd Integrated Living & Learning (HILL) dormitories.
Main Hall Resident Adviser and studio art major Emma Ward ‘27 also heard that one student who moved out of a HILL suite on South Campus last year was still able to swipe into residence hallways throughout last year and during this semester.
Sam Lingen ‘25, a music performance major in classical baritone voice, also knows of a student who had transferred out of Moravian but continued to swipe into the HILL a semester after leaving the university.
The Comenian brought the issue to Loyd’s attention on Nov. 19, the first time the administration or IT had heard about it.
Moravian opened a support case with Transact that same day and met with their technicians in the days following.
Their collaboration determined that a bug in the manufacturer’s software was failing to delete some old entries from the devices that control the doors in each building, allowing students to swipe into them without authorization. It was not clear, however, why the bug also affected some plastic IDs.
The administration also does not know if students who graduated or transferred out of Moravian had access to campus buildings during this period, because the devices that store that information are not in a human-readable format, making it impossible for them to identify which specific entries were affected.
On Nov. 21, IT sent a campus-wide email to students and faculty detailing the glitch in the system.
As of Nov. 23, a temporary fix for the glitch was put in place, which involves forcing a panel to re-sync with the central server for a fresh copy of the permissions, as it is supposed to do automatically. On Dec. 2, IT worked with Campus Police and Transact to apply the software patch to Moravian’s systems.
