D3.7 A Structured Collection on Information and Literature on Technological and Usability Aspects of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)

Untitled ISO 14443

ISO 14443

ISO 14443 is an international norm for contactless identification smartcards with a communication range of up to 20 cm (proximity or remote coupling). 

The standard series ISO 14443 consists of four parts and related amendments. It is an international norm for contactless integrated circuit(s) cards with a communication range of 10 to 20 centimetres (proximity cards) used for identification purposes. A data transfer rate of up to 424 kBit/s can be established, the frequency used is 13.56 MHz.

The four parts of ISO 14443 describe  

• the physical characteristics (part 1),  

• the radio frequency power and signal interface (part 2),  

• the initialization and anti-collision (part 3), and  

• the transmission protocol (part 4). 

ISO 14443 uses the terms PICC (proximity integrated circuit(s) card) for the contactless cards and PCD (proximity coupling device) for the readers. It describes two types of cards, type A and type B. The main differences between these two types regard signal modulation methods, coding schemes, and protocol initialization procedures.

ISO 14443 chips are used in a variety of products. E.g. one kind of Philips’ MIFARE cards or Machine Readable Travel Documents (MRTD) according to ICAO document 9303 is based on ISO 14443.

While the norm defines communication ranges between 10 and 20 centimetres, experiments showed that the communication between chip an reader can be eavesdropped at higher distances up to several metres. Such eavesdropping has already been used to show that the cryptographic key used to protect the communication between chip and reader in case of Dutch MRTDs could be broken in approximately three hours.