Confidex Announces High Security Contactless Tickets

Confidex Ltd. announced the launch of a new family of limited use contactless tickets with extended memory and increased security features.

The Confidex SafeRide product family uses NXP’s new MIFARE Ultralight C as the chip of choice. MIFARE Ultralight C has 192 bytes of memory and offers enhanced protection from counterfeiting. With 3DES, the chip uses a widely adopted open standard for authentication, thus enabling easy integration in existing contactless ticketing infrastructures.

While the popularity of public transportation is growing rapidly, there have been concerns by the authorities how secure the system can be from counterfeiting. Contactless technology has shown to be an excellent solution compared e.g. to magnetic stripe tickets, especially due to faster transactions and higher security features. The extended memory enables transit operators to develop new services, like Park&Ride, into the same limited use ticket.

As a leader in the contactless ticket market, Confidex strengthen their position by offering the new ticket products with unique cloning protection features, but still having full compliancy with the industry standards making the integration easy for the solution developers.

“Contactless technology is the de facto selection for any new fare collection solutions. The adoption of contactless tickets for limited use is also growing very rapidly. The benefits of faster and more reliable transactions for commuters, combined with RFID technology’s security and flexibility to develop new fare schemes, provide a value proposition that meets the demands to serve the growing mass transit passenger volumes. Since its establishment in 2005 Confidex’s focus has been to serve the Limited Use Ticket market and we have become the world leader in that market, measured by our delivery volumes and quality,” said Petteri Lavikko, Confidex vice president of product management.

“As the global leader in contactless security ICs, NXP is pleased that Confidex selects our latest MIFARE Ultralight C IC to design ticket solutions with enhanced security and flexibility”, said Henri Ardevol, general manager, automatic fare collection, NXP Semiconductors. “With this chip NXP is setting a new industry benchmark by introducing open standard 3DES cryptography authentication into the low cost contactless IC segment. The unique features of the MIFARE Ultralight C enables transport operators to expand their service offering beyond the traditional ticketing market, such as loyalty and prepaid services as well as NFC-enabled applications. “