The main security vulnerability that we need to address with regard to MiFare Classic is not about cryptogra- phy, RFID protocols and software vulnerabilities. In addition, we discovered that certain versions or clones of MiFare Classic are even weaker, and can be cloned in 1 second. Other researchers have also (independently from us) discovered this vulnerability (Garcia et al., 2009) however our attack requires less queries to the card and does not require any precomputation. For example, anybody sitting next to the victim on a train or on a plane is now be able to clone his/her pass. We discovered that a MiFare classic card can be cloned in a much more practical card-only scenario, where the attacker only needs to be in the proximity of the card for a number of minutes, therefore making usurpation of identity through pass cloning feasible at any moment and under any circumstances. At Esorics 2008 Dutch researchers showed that the underlying cipher Crypto-1 can be cracked in as little as 0.1 seconds if the attacker can access or eavesdrop the RF communications with the (genuine) reader. MiFare Classic is the most popular contactless smart card with about 200 millions copies in circulation world- wide. We critically discuss the attacks found, and plan to disclose our findings to NXP’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT).

Using this device we demonstrate that an attacker can increase the balance on the card without permission from the system owner. We demonstrate a proof of concept for one of our attacks by developing a relay device that allows an attacker to modify commands and responses as they pass between a genuine card and reader.

Resulting from our observations, we outline 3 attacks that would allow an attacker to manipulate our simulated public transportation application. We create a simulated public transportation application for the DESFire EV1 and observe the raw traffic using a Proxmark3 RFID tool. In this report, we focus on finding attacks against the DESFire EV1 application protocol itself. However to our knowledge, no practical attacks have been published against the newer MIFARE DESFire EV1 card to date. Attacks that result in recovery of the master keys for a card (thus allowing an attacker to manipulate the data on the card) have been published for both the MIFARE Classic and MIFARE DESFire cards. NXP’s MIFARE range of smartcards are used as electronic tickets in transportation systems worldwide.

Proxmark3 mifare desfire ev1 clone