I've heard it before: "Locks are there to keep honest people honest."
The lock on your front door won't stop someone breaking into your house. Or rather: your lock likely isn't the weakest point when it comes to keeping people out.
However, with the master keys it's not just about getting into places where you shouldn't be able to go, it's also about more or less locking a whole place down by disabling elevators. I can imagine you could put something a bit more complex to disable something which already requires electronics to function.
Yeah, I guess master key usage is just a little too broad. Opening doors doesn't seem like a huge issue, but I would at least require a supplementary password entry for crucial functionality like disabling elevators.
And in those life and death situations that emergency workers are involved in... would you accept the loss of a life because the emergency worker couldn't get hold of the password in time to save someone?
A second layer of protection for critical features that could cost lives is always a good idea. Have to balance authorized people using them with preventing unauthorized people from causing chaos, maybe a standardized pass code that changed once a month and all rescue workers received. If for instance 3d printers become household items and the key pattern is widely distributed online it could end up being a big problem.
Yeah, the question is really which potential harm is larger: unauthorized access, or the possible failure of authorized access? Then you need to ensure the system is more likely to fail in the less dangerous direction.
The lock on your front door won't stop someone breaking into your house. Or rather: your lock likely isn't the weakest point when it comes to keeping people out.
However, with the master keys it's not just about getting into places where you shouldn't be able to go, it's also about more or less locking a whole place down by disabling elevators. I can imagine you could put something a bit more complex to disable something which already requires electronics to function.