A Practical Attack on the MIFARE Classic

  • Authors:
  • Gerhard Koning Gans;Jaap-Henk Hoepman;Flavio D. Garcia

  • Affiliations:
  • Institute for Computing and Information Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen, GL Nijmegen, The Netherlands 6500;Institute for Computing and Information Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen, GL Nijmegen, The Netherlands 6500;Institute for Computing and Information Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen, GL Nijmegen, The Netherlands 6500

  • Venue:
  • CARDIS '08 Proceedings of the 8th IFIP WG 8.8/11.2 international conference on Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

The mifareClassic is the most widely used contactless smart card in the market. Its design and implementation details are kept secret by its manufacturer. This paper studies the architecture of the card and the communication protocol between card and reader. Then it gives a practical, low-cost, attack that recovers secret information from the memory of the card. Due to a weakness in the pseudo-random generator, we are able to recover the keystream generated by the CRYPTO1 stream cipher. We exploit the malleability of the stream cipher to read allmemory blocks of the first sector of the card. Moreover, we are able to read anysector of the memory of the card, provided that we know onememory block within this sector. Finally, and perhaps more damaging, the same holds for modifyingmemory blocks.