Ciphertext-only Cryptanalysis on Hardened Mifare Classic Cards

Despite a series of attacks, mifare Classic is still the world’s most widely deployed contactless smartcard on the market. The Classic uses a proprietary stream cipher crypto1 to provide confidentiality and mutual authentication between card and reader. However, once the cipher was reverse engineered, many serious vulnerabilities surfaced. A number of passive and active attacks were proposed that exploit these vulnerabilities. The most severe key recovery attacks only require wireless interaction with a card. System integrators consider such card-only attacks as one of the most serious threat vectors to their mifare Classic-based systems, since it allows the adversary to avoid camera detection, which is often present at an access control entrance or public transport gate. However, all card-only attacks proposed in the literature depend on implementation mistakes which can easily be mitigated without breaking backwards compatibility with the existing reader infrastructure. Consequen...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Carlo Meijer, Roel Verdult
• Keywords: CCS 2015, Security Privacy