Upgrade MiFare classic tags to NFC Forum Compliant + Sony RC-S320

CountParadox

Senior Member
May 15, 2013
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www.paradoxphotos.com
Hey there everyone, I'm making this thread to follow my plans on attempting to convert MiFare classic/1k tags to Desfire of FeliCa type tags.
Before people go telling me it cannot be done, IS THIS NOT THE 'NFC HACKING' FORUM!?
Let me have my fun and see what i'm able to do and learn on my own.
For now, I'm getting my hands on some different types of tags and cards, and i'm getting a Sydney Opal card soon (don't know what this uses yet)
I have also ordered a Sony RC-S320 Contactless IC Card Reader/Writer from eBay, got this for $30.
I know it can read/write FeliCa type, and NDEF type tags, interested in if it can do anything else too, can't find much documentation on it.. D:

Anyway basically my point with this is a family member that is techie in my family has set up some secret messages on NFC tags he got off eBay, and refuses to tell me what they are even though he got MiFare classic tags, and my I9505 cannot read them. He said just this: 'Deal With It'
>>
So my boredom helped me decide that I will get myself a bunch of different cards, a USB writer, and ill give a shot at making an app/program to do things with them.
This thread will also serve as documentation for the RC-S320 because there is none available and from the little I have seen, I THINK that it can emulate an NFC tag, which is something I see come up often on here. So I'll just write down what I find.
 

TaggerNFC

Member
Aug 7, 2013
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Toronto
According to our manufacturer they're all NDEF formatted but even if it was detected as a DESFire chip it would still not work with any Broadcom controller. It's like trying to make a Pentium 4 an AMD Athlon.
 

TaggerNFC

Member
Aug 7, 2013
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Toronto
Are you able to shed me some light on why it is incompatible, yet able to detect the cards and their unique ID? c:
>serious question
Simply put, we just know that NXP sell's our manufacturer the chips and they pre-program them. This can not be changed. It's not technically impossible but it would have to be done at the chip manufacturing level.

I know the MiFare Classic can have it's unique ID read by the Broadcom controller but for it to actually read the rest of the tag you would need to modify the reader itself. You can't make the MiFare Classic tag a NFC Forum type tag and unfortunately it will stay that way. I have consulted the engineers at our manufacturer that deals with NXP and he said that it's a possibility that needs to be explored but the first step he say's is to write to the read-only partitions which is seemingly impossible.

On another note, we offer competitive pricing on NFC tags. Please refer to my sig to visit our website.
 
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zvieratko

Senior Member
Dec 9, 2007
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There is nothing read-only if you have the right card - for example UID is fixed on all consumer cards, but cards with changeable UID still exist. So unless the card is different on a hardware-level (like some additional crypto-support) then it is possible to make it into almost anything.
 

TaggerNFC

Member
Aug 7, 2013
20
2
0
Toronto
There is nothing read-only if you have the right card - for example UID is fixed on all consumer cards, but cards with changeable UID still exist. So unless the card is different on a hardware-level (like some additional crypto-support) then it is possible to make it into almost anything.
Well we only sell consumer cards so we wouldn't know much about cards that are fully rewriteable. It's easier just to buy NFC Forum type tags so that compatibility isn't a issue.