NXP MIFARE DESFire Platform Chosen by Madrid Public Transportation System

Based on MIFARE DESFire EV1, NXP’s contactless IC technology will be used to drive all season tickets including subsidized travel tickets for younger and retired passengers. NXP’s MIFARE DESFire EV1 is one of the most secure solutions for smartcards on the market today, offering fast read rates and advanced security features, which make it the ideal solution for transport ticket schemes, access management and identity applications.

MIFARE DESFire is an open architecture platform for end-to-end solutions offering the flexibility and security necessary for a state of the art fare collection system. The platform has been proven in many cities worldwide including London, New Delhi and Nanjing. It is important that innovative multi-application services can be added seamlessly onto the platform, such as banking convergence cards through the MIFARE DESFire EV1 implementations on payment cards or NFC applications on mobile phones. In the open architecture platform of MIFARE, these services are enabled by a wide range of supporting products from licensed partners.

The ability of MIFARE DESFire to integrate security systems based on 3-DES and AES, and its evolution to more advanced products (like the MIFARE DESFire EV1), have been some of the reasons, among others, that have determined the choice of this product by CRTM as the technology for their tickets said Antonio Rubio Fernández, Jefe del Área de Innovación Tecnológica, Consorcio Regional de Transportes de Madrid.

Madrid’s new contactless ticketing operation is serving a population of over 5.2 million people and many tourists and business travelers. It offers increased benefits to both passengers and the CRTM alike. Typically contactless terminals and checkpoint gates offer increased performance, improving embarkation and disembarkation speeds, helping improve the overall passenger experience. In addition, the creation of a new contactless-based AFC solution will enable the development of new fare systems, benefiting both residents and visitors to Madrid.

“This is a huge milestone for NXP. Madrid is the continent’s third largest city, so this is a significant testament to the capabilities of this product,” said Henri Ardevol, Vice President and General Manager of Secure Transactions, NXP Semiconductors. “Due to the size of Madrid’s public transportation systems, CRTM wanted to deploy the most secure and scalable contactless AFC solution possible. As a result, our solution was required to undergo rigorous testing and piloting to ensure it fully met the needs of the consortium, thus demonstrating the superior features and security we’ve built into this product.”

MIFARE DESFire EV1 has been designed for systems integrators looking for leading security features and wanting to combine multiple applications in one contactless smartcard. The product is based upon open global standards for both air interfaces and cryptographic methods. In addition to offering data transfer rates of up to 848 kbit/s, MIFARE DESFire utilizes a Triple DES, 3K DES, and AES hardware cryptographic engine for securing the data on the smartcards and data during transmission.