MIFARE® is one of the most popular contactless smart card technologies in use, with over 10 billion chips and 150 million readers having been produced to date. This 13.56Mhz high frequency technology is based on the ISO/IEC 14443A standard and is used extensively for payments, transportation, access control, education, and loyalty card schemes amongst other applications.
Over the years, the MIFARE product family has grown to include a wide range of chips that address the needs of more specialized applications, but the largest evolution came in 2002 with the introduction of the MIFARE DESFire® chip.
DESFire chips contain a full microprocessor that is similar in structure to SmartMX and has much more robust security features compared to MIFARE Classic. While the proprietary Crypto-1 security protocol used in MIFARE Classic has been publicly compromised, the Triple-DES/AES based crypto of DESFire Ev1 remains secure. This has made DESFire Ev1 a popular choice in transportation, payments, and access control applications where security is essential. DESFire Ev2 was announced by NXP in November 2013 and will include applications such as MIsmartApp to allow 3rd party use of memory space without the need to share secret keys.
Cardzgroup’s MIFARE and DESFire cards can be found in some of the largest transportation, payments, and loyalty card projects worldwide. We supply printed and personalized MIFARE and DESFire cards to over 50 universities and hundreds of globally recognized brands.