Jefferson's Wheel

NXP, the manufacturer of the smart cards we analyzed recently, announced an improved card that could help with the migration to higher security levels. The Tech Herald has more on this.

The Mifare Plus cards implement secure 128-bit AES as well as the proprietary Crypto-1 cipher (that we have shown to be weak), but allow for the latter to be switched off once all cards have been migrated. Since all readers and cards still have to be replaced, the new cards are not necessarily a better choice than alternative cards. And while the Plus card won’t be seen in the market for another year, other cards with strong cryptography such as DESfire are readily available.

One feature of the Plus card that might be worth the wait is its improved privacy protection. Protecting individuals from being tracked has long been a research interest of ours and we are curious to see how industry solved this challenging problem.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 10:36 am and is filed under Cryptography, Privacy, RFID, Security.