MIFARE

MIFARE is the NXP Semiconductors-owned trademark of a series of chips widely used in contactless smart cards and proximity cards.

The MIFARE name covers proprietary technologies based upon various levels of the ISO/IEC 14443 Type A 13.56 MHz contactless smart card standard. According to MIFARE themselves, 10 billion of their smart card chips and 150 million of their reader modules have been sold. The technology is owned by NXP Semiconductors, which was spun off from Philips Electronics in 2006.

The technology is embodied in both cards and readers.

The MIFARE name (derived from the term MIkron FARE Collection System) covers seven different kinds of contactless cards:

The MIFARE Classic card is fundamentally just a memory storage device, where the memory is divided into segments and blocks with simple security mechanisms for access control. They are ASIC-based and have limited computational power. Thanks to their reliability and low cost, those cards are widely used for electronic wallet, access control, corporate ID cards, transportation or stadium ticketing.

The MIFARE Classic 1K offers 1024 bytes of data storage, split into 16 sectors; each sector is protected by two different keys, called A and B. Each key can be programmed to allow operations such as reading, writing, increasing value blocks, etc. MIFARE Classic 4K offers 4096 bytes split into forty sectors, of which 32 are same size as in the 1K with eight more that are quadruple size sectors. MIFARE Classic mini offers 320 bytes split into five sectors. For each of these card types, 16 bytes per sector are reserved for the keys and access conditions and can not normally be used for user data. Also, the very first 16 bytes contain the serial number of the card and certain other manufacturer data and are read only. That brings the net storage capacity of these cards down to 752 bytes for MIFARE Classic 1K, 3440 bytes for MIFARE Classic 4K, and 224 bytes for Mini. It uses an NXP proprietary security protocol (Crypto-1) for authentication and ciphering.

The Samsung TecTile NFC tag stickers use MIFARE Classic chips. This means only devices with an NXP NFC controller chip can read or write these tags. At the moment BlackBerry phones, the Nokia Lumia 610 (August 2012), the Google Nexus 4, Google Nexus 7 LTE and Nexus 10 (October 2013) can't read/write TecTile stickers.

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Wikipedia