Emulator of contactless smart cards in FPGA

Abstract

This paper describes implementation of contactless smart card emulator compliant with ISO/IEC 14443 in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Systems using contactless smart cards are widely used and some of these systems are not secured properly. For example in many such systems smart card Unique Identifier (UID) is used as the only one authentication mean. As the UID is not encrypted and is read from the card in plain, it is easy to make a copy of the smart card and use the clone as the original card. In this work we describe emulator of a smart card implemented in FPGA which is able to spoof some genuine smart card. Emulator described in this work emulates protocol described in ISO/IEC 14443 standard, which in detail describes all aspects of RFID smart cards (from physical attributes of both — cards and readers — to communication by digital signals). The emulator is able to come through the whole card selection process and to spoof the real smart card with given UID. Moreover emulator can be selected also for higher application layer protocol communication. If we know the proprietary application layer protocol, emulator is able to spoof communication on this protocol with data recorded in it. This functionality was successfully tested on systems used at Czech Technical University in Prague, where the weak implementation of UID as the only one authentication mean without any proprietary protocol is used. Emulator is responding faster than most of other existing smart card emulators thanks to high efficient implementation in hardware.