Philips 768
MIFARE is reputedly the most widely installed contactless smartcard technology in the world with 500 million smart card chips and 5 million reader modules sold. The technology is owned by Philips Austria GmbH.
The MIFARE technology is based upon the ISO 14443 Type A 13. 56 MHz contactless smart card standard.
The technology is embodied in both cards and readers (also referred to as a Proximity Coupling Device).
The MIFARE name covers 2 really different kind of contactless cards :
MIFARE Standard (or Classic) cards employ a proprietary high-level protocol instead of ISO 14443-4, with a Philips proprietary security protocol for authentication and ciphering. Scheda tecnica Philips 768. MIFARE UltraLight cards employ the same protocol, but without the security part. MIFARE Pro, ProX, and SmartMX, are Philips brand names for smartcards that comply to ISO 14443-4 (T=CL). MIFARE Standard
The cards are fundamentally just memory storage devices, where the memory is divided into segments and blocks with simple security mechanisms for access control. They are ASIC based and therefore have limited computational power. Thanks to their low cost and reliability, those cards are widely used for electronic wallet, access control, corporate ID cards, transportation or stadium ticketing.