Mifare standard 1K and Mifare standard 4K card

MIFARE is the NXP Semiconductors-owned trademark (a spin-off company formed out of Philips Semiconductors) of the reputedly most widely installed contactless smartcard, or proximity card, technology in the world with 500 million smart card chips and 5 million reader modules sold. The patented technology is owned by NXP Semiconductors, with its Headquarters in Eindhoven, the Netherlands and main business sites in Nijmegen, the Netherlands and Hamburg, Germany.

The MIFARE proprietary technology is based upon the ISO 14443 (RFID) Type A 13.56 MHz contactless smart card standard.The technology is embodied in both cards and readers.MIFARE Standard (or Classic) cards employ a proprietary high-level protocol instead of ISO 14443-4, with an NXP proprietary security protocol for authentication and ciphering.

The MIFARE Standard 1k offers about 768 bytes of data storage, split into 16 sectors; each sector is protected by two different keys, called A and B. They can be programmed for operations like reading, writing, increasing value blocks, etc.). MIFARE Standard 4k offers 3 kB split into 40 sectors of which 32 are same size as in the 1K with 8 more that are double size sectors. MIFARE Standard mini offers 320bytes split into 5 sectors.

The simplicity of the basic cards means that they are inexpensive, which is largely the reason for their success in large-scale deployments, such as Oyster card.