Abstract
The mifare Classic is a contactless smart card that is used extensively in access control for office buildings, payment systems for public transport, and other applications. We reverse engineered the security mechanisms of this chip: the authentication protocol, the symmetric cipher, and the initialization mechanism. We describe several security vulnerabilities in these mechanisms and exploit these vulnerabilities with two attacks; both are capable of retrieving the secret key from a genuine reader. The most serious one recovers the secret key from just one or two authentication attempts with a genuine reader in less than a second on ordinary hardware and without any pre-computation. Using the same methods, an attacker can also eavesdrop the communication between a tag and a reader, and decrypt the whole trace, even if it involves multiple authentications. This enables an attacker to clone a card or to restore a real card to a previous state.
Keywords
- Authentication Protocol
- Linear Feedback Shift Register
- Authentication Request
- Authentication Session
- Precomputed Table
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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References
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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Garcia, F.D. et al. (2008). Dismantling MIFARE Classic. In: Jajodia, S., Lopez, J. (eds) Computer Security - ESORICS 2008. ESORICS 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5283. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88313-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88313-5_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-88312-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-88313-5
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