HID Global Corporation 5553 Manuale Utente

1508-USM-00-0-04

HF Multi ISO RFID Reader User Manual, Firmware V1.4

4.3 MIFARE Card Type

What type of MIFARE card should I use?

The MIFARE standard is designed for multi-application environments. It contains 16
sectors each with 2 individual keys, access conditions, and 3 data or value blocks. Some
applications use the 1 Kbytes of the MIFARE Standard Card Memory only as storage
area.

MIFARE Ultra light has no crypto unit on chip. It only supports 16 blocks.

MIFARE Standard 4k cards have the same features as MIFARE Standard cards but
increased memory capacity.

4.4 MIFARE

How safe is MIFARE Standard for cashless payment?

Security is always a feature of the overall system, not of the components. It requires
careful design.

A properly designed system will require ALL barriers to be hacked in order to be broken.

For good design start identifying possible attacks and then create barriers to block them.

MIFARE was specifically designed for cashless payment applications. The MIFARE
concept provides the following security barriers:

 Anti-collision/-selection
 Atomic

value

transaction

 Ciphered

communication



Storage of values and data protected by mutual authentication



Weak field keys that allow decrement only



Stored keys in the reader that are not readable



Keys in the card that are not readable



A brute force attack based on trying many different keys is limited by the transaction
time (several ms) of the card and would last virtually forever.

Page 106 of 144

August 2010