System level security measures for MIFARE installations
●When designing contactless systems, e.g. based on MIFARE DESFire or MIFARE Plus it is important to design the system such that it is resilient against attacks, of course in a balance between costs, risks and impact when some of those risks materialize.
●MIFARE DESFire EV2 and MIFARE Plus EV1 both have Common Criteria (CC) EAL5+ certification and are thereby the chips which currently have the highest certified resilience against attacks of chips for similar purposes in the industry. It means that these chips have been tested to withstand attacks with power analysis, light attacks and many more and found to be able to withstand those attacks.
●Like for any chip that has Common Criteria certification of any level, MIFARE Plus and MIFARE DESFire having CC certification does not mean with absolute certainty that these chips can never be successfully attacked at any time in future. Attack methods get increasingly more sophisticated and so do the defenses that NXP builds into the chips. Unlike security in PCs, which can be generally updated and thereby increased over time, the MIFARE Plus and MIFARE DESFire chips are as they are and new defenses can (and will) only be built into future generations of chips.
●The systems in which those chips are deployed can be designed such that if there ever would be an attacker being able to successfully attack the chip that the impact of this attack is limited and that the damage can be repaired.
●This document describes design considerations for systems deploying MIFARE Plus or MIFARE DESFire to reduce the chances of attacks being successful and then to reduce the impact in the unlikely case that an attack was successful.
●This document does not describe security design for the backend of such systems, e.g. the way in which terminals are connected to the central IT system.
●This document was written with the scope of the chips that have the highest resistance against attacks. However, for other chips, like MIFARE DESFire EV1 (the predecessor MIFARE DESFire EV2) and MIFARE Ultralight the same considerations hold. For of MIFARE Classic there is a separate document, see [1], with some other countermeasures which are specific for that type of chip.
●In this document, the term „MIFARE card“ refers to a contactless card with an embedded MIFARE IC.
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Application note & Design Guide |
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Please see the document for details |
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English Chinese Chinese and English Japanese |
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22 April 2020 |
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Rev. 2.1 |
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AN10969;196521 |
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217 KB |
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