Physical access management block diagram

Contactless smart cards are offering a convenient and secure way to give access to buildings. Compared to traditional technologies such as mechanical keys or mag stripe cards, they offer more flexibility and ease of use. You just hold your card next to the reader and the door opens, provided the card contains the necessary rights. In addition, the same cards can be easily used for work time tracking or canteen payment schemes. Access Management is a growing global segment where several hundred million cards are used every year.

Many systems are based on popular NXP ICs such as MIFARE™ Classic or Hitag. For new systems, especially where security is important, we recommend to use MIFARE Plus™ or MIFARE DESFire™ EV1. These ICs are common criteria certified and base their security architecture on proven open cryptography.

MIFARE Plus is the migration product to bring MIFARE Classic based system to AES security. It features the same memory structure as MIFARE Classic. MIFARE Plus offers innovative features to protect the user’s privacy with random IDs or the virtual card architecture as well as advanced security mechanism such as the proximity check against relay attacks.

MIFARE DESFire provides a flexible memory based on a 7816 file system and the choice of 3DES or AES cryptography. In addition to the physical access to buildings, a secure smart card can also protect the logical access to PCs. Applets programmed on the NXP SmartMX™ ICs are described in the logical access section.
For access management readers, NXP offers reader ICs and SAMs to enable communication and secure key storage in the reader.

For additional information, click on AN10922 and AN10957

_{Download Full Block Diagram Below}