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.