6 research outputs found
A Practical Attack on the MIFARE Classic
The MIFARE Classic 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 all memory blocks of the first sector of the card.
Moreover, we are able to read any sector of the memory of the card, provided
that we know one memory block within this sector. Finally, and perhaps more
damaging, the same holds for modifying memory blocks