The Fall of a Tiny Star
Flavio D. Garcia, Bart Jacobs · 2013
www.cs.ru.nl/~flaviog www.cs.ru.nl/~bart Abstract This short paper gives a combined technical-historical account of the fate of the world’s most-used contactless smart card, the MIFARE Classic. The account concentrates on the years 2008 and 2009 when serious security flaws in the MIFARE Classic were unveiled. The story covers, besides the relevant technicalities, the risks of proprietary security mechanisms, the rights and morals wrt. publishing security vulnerabilities, and eventually the legal confrontation in court. 1