1 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.

2 Features and benefits

• Contactless transmission of data and supply energy compliant to ISO/IEC 14443 -2/ -3 A, see [1]and [2]

• Operating frequency of 13.56 MHz

• Data transfer of 106 kbit/s

• Data integrity of 16-bit CRC, parity, bit coding, bit counting

• Anti-collision function allows to operate more than one card in the field simultaneously

• Low power consumption enabling operating distances of up to 10 cm (depending on various parameters as

e.g. field strength and antenna geometry)

• Fast start-up time for reliable and robust detection

• Support of double size (7-byte) Unique IDentifiers (UID) and optionally Random ID (RID) according to ISO/IEC

14443-3 A, [2]

• Optional CMAC calculation for data integrity protection

• 3-pass mutual authentication with AES based on a 128-bit key

• ECC-based originality signature, offering the possibility for customizing and permanently locking

• Fast read command

• 17 pF and 50 pF input capacitance to support high user convenience throughout different form factors

• Fast counter transaction

3 Applications

The target applications of the MIFARE Ultralight AES are primarily designed for single or limited use

applications such as:

• Public transport for limited use ticketing

• Hospitality RFID basic guest card

• Event ticketing

• Electronic voucher

• Loyalty tickets