ICs Promise Secure, Contactless Transactions in Smart-City Apps

June 5, 2020

Fast, secure contactless transactions with mobile and multi-application support enable service providers to collaborate and scale services.

David Maliniak

Related To: NXP Semiconductors

Offering advanced security features and seamless integration of mobile services, NXP Semiconductors’ MIFARE DESFire EV3 IC represents the third generation of NXP’s contactless MIFARE DESFire portfolio. The latest iteration of the IC is backwards-compatible with earlier versions but offers greater operating distance and improved transaction speed. It delivers faster, more secure transactions that are truly contactless, such as paying for parking, accessing offices or campuses, and using other essential city services—all touch-free.

Building on its heritage of powering mass-transit ticketing, the MIFARE DESFire EV3 IC provides multi-application support and delivers a wide array of enhanced features that allows transit agencies, access control solution providers, and system integrators to collaborate on new business models and scale their services.

An extensive set of security features in the MIFARE DESFire EV3 IC provides more ways to protect data and help ensure privacy. The IC’s hardware and software are certified to Common Criteria EAL 5+, and the IC supports a broad choice of open crypto algorithms. A card-generated MAC helps to securely authenticate transactions, and a new Transaction Timer feature helps mitigate man-in-the-middle attack, making it harder for an attacker to interfere with the transaction. Additionally, a new Secure Unique NFC (SUN) messaging feature offers a more secure method for maintaining data confidentiality and integrity. Each time a card, phone, or ticket is tapped with the SUN featured enabled, a tap-unique authentication message and crypto-secure URL are generated that can be sent to a server for verification, which makes taps unclonable.

Support for MIFARE DESFire EV3 will be integrated into NXP’s MIFARE 2GO cloud service, which manages digitized MIFARE product-based credentials and helps streamline mobile integration via NXP’s ecosystem. With this, smart-city services can be seamlessly deployed to NFC-enabled smartphones, wearables and other mobile devices.

For simplified deployment, each MIFARE DESFire EV3 IC is pre-configured with keys to enable delegated application management, which supports seamless, over-the-air updates to already deployed smart cards using NFC-enabled smartphones.

In addition, NXP’s upcoming MIFARE Plus EV2 IC will provide a drop-in replacement for upgrading existing MIFARE Plus and MIFARE Classic product-based installations to higher security.

NXP Semiconductors, www.nxp.com

About the Author

David Maliniak | Executive Editor, Microwaves & RF

I am Executive Editor of Microwaves & RF, an all-digital publication that broadly covers all aspects of wireless communications. More particularly, we're keeping a close eye on technologies in the consumer-oriented 5G, 6G, IoT, M2M, and V2X markets, in which much of the wireless market's growth will occur in this decade and beyond. I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, developers, and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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About me:

In his long career in the B2B electronics-industry media, David Maliniak has held editorial roles as both generalist and specialist. As Components Editor and, later, as Editor in Chief of EE Product News, David gained breadth of experience in covering the industry at large. In serving as EDA/Test and Measurement Technology Editor at Electronic Design, he developed deep insight into those complex areas of technology. Most recently, David worked in technical marketing communications at Teledyne LeCroy, leaving to rejoin the EOEM B2B publishing world in January 2020. David earned a B.A. in journalism at New York University.