General description
MIFARE Ultralight AES is a smart IC serving the requirements of limited use applications
for contactless tickets and RFID key cards managed by one single entity. MIFARE
Ultralight AES is offering a powerful mix between performance, security, privacy and
flexibility. It addresses the needs of limited use applications such as public transport,
hospitality, access, event ticketing and loyalty applications, by expanding the MIFARE
Ultralight ticketing IC portfolio and adds Advanced Encryption Standards (AES) into it.
MIFARE Ultralight AES comes with AES-128 cryptography and enables product
protection mechanisms in terms of product authenticity and integrity. Its enhanced feature
and command set enables efficient implementations and offers flexibility in system
designs and is a perfect contactless ticketing expansion to the smart card contactless
IC families such as MIFARE DESFire or MIFARE Plus. Based on these parameters the
MIFARE Ultralight AES is a trusted platform targeting the secure authentication of people
with an intuitive convenient user experience.
MIFARE Ultralight AES is fully compliant with the contactless proximity smart card
protocol according to ISO/IEC 14443-3 making it compatible with the majority of existing
contactless infrastructure devices. Its contactless performance supports advanced user
convenience and reading distances up to 10 cm (depending on various parameters as
e.g. field strength and antenna geometry).
MIFARE Ultralight AES has a 4 byte per one page memory structure with a total user
memory of 144-byte. To protect sensitive data against unauthorized access, MIFARE
Ultralight AES offers a 3-pass mutual authentication based on AES with a 128-bit key.
For data integrity protection an optional CMAC calculation for commands and response
can be enabled, following NIST Special Publication 800-38B, see [15]. Besides the
data protection MIFARE Ultralight AES serves the option to protect one out of the three
independent 24-bit one-way counters by an AES authentication. To prevent undefined
counters values due to tear-off in the field or originating from interrupted programming
cycles an advanced anti-tearing support is implemented.
MIFARE Ultralight AES is also ready to support contactless applications addressing
privacy sensitive use-cases. With its optional support of Random ID, it enables
compliance with latest user data protection regulations.
MIFARE Ultralight AES enables check of the manufacturing origin of a ticket by
verification of an asymmetric signature retrieved from the IC using the UID and an
ECC-based originality signature. The default NXP signature can be overwritten with a
customer-specific signature during personalization. The purpose of originality check
is to identify mass penetration of none-genuine MIFARE Ultralight AES ICs into an
infrastructure.
MIFARE Ultralight AES is designed to support smart ticket antenna designs with a 17
pF input capacitance as well as smaller form factors for key fobs, tags or wristbands by
providing 50 pF input capacitance. This is offered by FFC deliveries and MOA8 modules
to ensure high user convenience throughout different form factors.