NXP offers enhanced security for contactless smart city services

NXP Semiconductors N.V. has launched a new MIFARE DESFire EV3 IC that provides advanced security and seamless integration of mobile services for connectivity in smart city services.

As the third evolution of NXP’s proven contactless MIFARE DESFire portfolio, the latest IC is backwards compatible and offers enhanced performance with a greater operating distance and improved transaction speed. In combination with its advanced security features, the new IC delivers faster, more secure transactions that are truly contactless — such as paying for parking, accessing offices or campuses and using other essential city services — and all touch-free.

“With the launch of MIFARE DESFire EV3, NXP is laying the foundation for a new level of connected smart city services that are form factor independent and can be available on a traditional smart card or mobile device,” said Philippe Dubois, VP and GM of IoT Security and Secure Mobility & Retail at NXP.

With proven success over the past 25 years, NXP’s MIFARE product portfolio is at the heart of smart city installations worldwide. The MIFARE DESFire EV3 IC builds upon the portfolio’s heritage of powering mass transit ticketing by delivering the next level of convenience for end users and reliability for service providers. NXP’s IC provides multi-application support and delivers a wide array of enhanced features that allows transit agencies, access control solution providers, and system integrators to collaborate on new business models and scale their services.

“We are committed to provide our riders with secure, reliable and flexible transport ticketing solutions,” said Barry Dorgan, head of Ticketing Systems at the Irish National Transport Authority. “By using NXP’s proven MIFARE DESFire products, we can continue to support our riders with a seamless transport experience that is both safe and convenient.”

Raising the bar
An extensive set of security features, MIFARE DESFire EV3 IC offers more ways to protect data and help ensure privacy. The IC hardware and software are certified to Common Criteria EAL 5+, and the IC supports a broad choice of open crypto algorithms. A card generated MAC helps to securely authenticate transactions and a new Transaction Timer feature helps mitigate man-in-the-middle attacks so it’s harder for an attacker to interfere with the transaction.

Additionally, its new Secure Unique NFC (SUN) messaging feature offers a more secure method for maintaining data confidentiality and integrity. Each time a card, phone or ticket is tapped with the SUN featured enabled, a tap-unique authentication message and crypto-secure URL are generated that can be sent to a server for verification, which makes taps completely resistant to cloning.

Mobile support
Support for MIFARE DESFire EV3 will be integrated into NXP’s MIFARE 2GO cloud service, which manages digitized MIFARE product-based credentials and helps streamline mobile integration via NXP’s ecosystem. With this, smart city services can be seamlessly deployed to NFC-enabled smartphones, wearables, and other mobile devices.

“The security features of the IC help prevent fraud and theft and, combined with its ability to support a broad range of applications, the IC paves the way for managing many other smart city services beyond transit and access control,” explained Dubois. “NXP is proud to empower society with our contactless solutions for broad scale use, as the worldwide impact of COVID-19 makes contact-free transactions a necessity.”

For simplified deployment, each MIFARE DESFire EV3 IC is pre-configured with keys to enable delegated application management, which supports seamless, over-the-air updates to already deployed smart cards using NFC-enabled smartphones.

In addition, NXP’s upcoming MIFARE Plus EV2 IC will provide a drop-in replacement for upgrading existing MIFARE Plus and MIFARE Classic product-based installations to higher security.