1 General description
MIFARE Ultralight AES is a smart IC serving the requirements of limited use applications for contactless tickets
and RFID key cards managed by one single entity. MIFARE Ultralight AES is offering a powerful mix between
performance, security, privacy and flexibility. It addresses the needs of limited use applications such as public
transport, hospitality, access, event ticketing and loyalty applications, by expanding the MIFARE Ultralight
ticketing IC portfolio and adds Advanced Encryption Standards (AES) into it.
MIFARE Ultralight AES comes with AES-128 cryptography and enables product protection mechanisms
in terms of product authenticity and integrity. Its enhanced feature and command set enables efficient
implementations and offers flexibility in system designs and is a perfect contactless ticketing expansion to the
smart card contactless IC families such as MIFARE DESFire or MIFARE Plus. Based on these parameters
the MIFARE Ultralight AES is a trusted platform targeting the secure authentication of people with an intuitive
convenient user experience.
MIFARE Ultralight AES is fully compliant with the contactless proximity smart card protocol according to ISO/
IEC 14443-3 making it compatible with the majority of existing contactless infrastructure devices. Its contactless
performance supports advanced user convenience and reading distances up to 10 cm (depending on various
parameters as e.g. field strength and antenna geometry).
MIFARE Ultralight AES has a 4 byte per one page memory structure with a total user memory of 144-byte.
To protect sensitive data against unauthorized access, MIFARE Ultralight AES offers a 3-pass mutual
authentication based on AES with a 128-bit key. For data integrity protection an optional CMAC calculation for
commands and response can be enabled, following NIST Special Publication 800-38B, see [15]. Besides the
data protection MIFARE Ultralight AES serves the option to protect one out of the three independent 24-bit
one-way counters by an AES authentication. To prevent undefined counters values due to tear-off in the field or
originating from interrupted programming cycles an advanced anti-tearing support is implemented.
MIFARE Ultralight AES is also ready to support contactless applications addressing privacy sensitive
use-cases. With its optional support of Random ID, it enables compliance with latest user data protection
regulations.
MIFARE Ultralight AES enables check of the manufacturing origin of a ticket by verification of an asymmetric
signature retrieved from the IC using the UID and an ECC-based originality signature. The default NXP
signature can be overwritten with a customer-specific signature during personalization. The purpose
of originality check is to identify mass penetration of none-genuine MIFARE Ultralight AES ICs into an
infrastructure.
MIFARE Ultralight AES is designed to support smart ticket antenna designs with a 17 pF input capacitance
as well as smaller form factors for key fobs, tags or wristbands by providing 50 pF input capacitance. This
is offered by FFC deliveries and MOA8 modules to ensure high user convenience throughout different form
factors.

2 Features and benefits
• Contactless transmission of data and supply energy compliant to ISO/IEC 14443 -2/ -3 A, see [1]and [2]
• Operating frequency of 13.56 MHz
• Data transfer of 106 kbit/s
• Data integrity of 16-bit CRC, parity, bit coding, bit counting
• Anti-collision function allows to operate more than one card in the field simultaneously
• Low power consumption enabling operating distances of up to 10 cm (depending on various parameters as
e.g. field strength and antenna geometry)
• Fast start-up time for reliable and robust detection
• Support of double size (7-byte) Unique IDentifiers (UID) and optionally Random ID (RID) according to ISO/IEC
14443-3 A, [2]
• Optional CMAC calculation for data integrity protection
• 3-pass mutual authentication with AES based on a 128-bit key
• ECC-based originality signature, offering the possibility for customizing and permanently locking
• Fast read command
• 17 pF and 50 pF input capacitance to support high user convenience throughout different form factors
• Fast counter transaction

3 Applications
The target applications of the MIFARE Ultralight AES are primarily designed for single or limited use
applications such as:
• Public transport for limited use ticketing
• Hospitality RFID basic guest card
• Event ticketing
• Electronic voucher
• Loyalty tickets