Introducing RockOS and Rock Cortex: What's New with Alcatraz at GSX 2026
We've got a few updates to walk through: official names for the firmware and platform behind every Rock, a handful of features landing in October, and where to find us at GSX 2026 in Atlanta.
The problem: the door hasn't caught up
While most organizations have spent the last decade hardening their digital perimeter, the door has remained the weak point. Badges get shared, PINs get written down, and legacy fingerprint and iris readers fail often enough that people just prop the door open rather than deal with them.
A study we ran with YouGov of 2,000 U.S. adults puts numbers behind it: 45% have personally experienced or witnessed unauthorized entry into a secured building, and while 58% have never heard the term "tailgating" in a security context, 88% recognize it as a serious risk once it's explained. That gap matters because traditional badge and card systems verify a credential, not the person holding it, and can't catch a second person slipping through on someone else's swipe.
Read the full results in the Alcatraz Tailgating Study.
Our approach
With Alcatraz, your face is the credential. Rock X, Alcatraz's facial authentication device, authenticates who someone actually is, on-device and in real time, whether that's standing on its own at the door or layering on as a second factor alongside what you already have, without ever sending a face or biometric image off to be stored somewhere else.
Put simply, Alcatraz is the Face ID of physical security. Authentication happens in under a second at every entry point, so people walk straight through instead of badging, scanning, or stopping. That same recognition doubles as security intelligence, catching tailgating, piggybacking, and impersonation as it happens instead of just recording it after the fact. It's privacy-first by design, and it scales from one door to every door, in any country, from a single dashboard.
Giving a name to RockOS and Rock Cortex
The Rock X runs on two software layers, and today we're giving them official names. RockOS is the firmware that powers the Rock device family: enrollment, liveness detection, authentication, and tailgating detection. Rock Cortex is the platform handling verification, users, device management, integrations, monitoring, analytics, and compliance across your entire deployment, not just a single door. You've been using this technology all along. Now it has a name, and a foundation built for what's coming next.
A few of the enhancements on our roadmap, planned for GA in October 2026:
- Field of View Adjustment - Adjust a Rock's camera field of view remotely from the dashboard, using a live image pulled directly from the device, instead of guessing whether a zone is set up correctly. The goal is faster setup and fewer site visits.
- Increased Profile Capacity - Support for up to 100,000 user profiles per deployment, removing a ceiling that today can force large enterprises and campuses into multi-device workarounds.
- Improved Enrollment - A guided enrollment experience that doesn't require moving or tilting your head, making onboarding faster and reducing help-desk time spent on failed attempts.
Find us at GSX 2026
We'll be at Global Security Exchange (GSX) 2026, September 14–16 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta and we're bringing five partners with us to show Rock X running on some of the industry's leading entrance and access control hardware:
- Smarter Security - see Rock X mounted on the Glassgate 250 optical turnstile. Booth #1415
- Boon Edam - see the Rock featured on the Circlelock security revolving door, with Rock X on the Tourlock mantrap portal. Booth #2633
- RightCrowd - see Rock X integrated into their identity and access workflows. Booth #1019
- Gunnebo - see Rock X paired with Gunnebo's entrance security solutions. Booth #2123
- ColorID - see Rock X integrated with ColorID's access control and turnstile solutions. Booth #3117
If you're headed to Atlanta, stop by booth #1339 to see Alcatraz’s facial authentication and real-time tailgating detection, and get a first look at where RockOS and Rock Cortex are headed next. Schedule time with our team at GSX 2026.
We'll see you in Atlanta
