Interestingly, HID sells cards that utilize MIFARE DESFire, although DESFire as implemented by HID is also proprietary, so in order to use DESFire with an HID reader, you must purchase HID DESFire cards, which cost much more than non-proprietary DESFire cards. Mobile access vendors, such as Proxy and others, have mobile readers that can read DESFire cards. While MIFARE DESFire is bound to the NXP chip, it is not exclusive of one card or reader manufacture and can achieve interoperability between vendors. Also worth noting is that other mobile access solutions use encryption to mask credentials shared over wireless mediums between phones and readers, but they do not use Seos as it is a proprietary technology to HID. Note that you will need to purchase an additional Seos credential to use it on mobile as well – one credential can not be applied to both cards and mobile devices. Seos technology extends beyond cards and is used in HID mobile access solutions as well. If time is money then it would also be worth mentioning here that, on average, card vendors can deliver custom-printed DESFire cards in 2-3 days vs 2-3 weeks for custom-printed Seos cards. Baseline prices are set at wholesale and carefully managed, and there is limited sourcing competition.“ It is not sold by any other channel than HID. Terry Gold of D6 Research explains the cost differential, saying “The entire Seos packaging is 100% proprietary. However, the relative cost difference grows as the volume increases. Here is an average of card costs at various volumes based on a sampling of trusted card vendors:īecause of the minimum card order HID enforces with its wholesalers, it can be expensive to purchase Seos cards at a small volume. The competitive card format is DESfire EV1 which is also completely proprietary but has gone through common criteria certification.” (Common Criteria certification: EAL5+ for IC hardware and software) Regarding Seos, Terry Gold of D6 research notes: “There is no information on the Seos website as to certification, third party testing or community code reviews. One concern across both cards is they both leverage proprietary encryption, which is typically frowned upon in the cryptographic community since it’s not peer reviewed. Both Seos and DESFire use secret keys to ensure the card-reader connection is secure, and neither card format has been proven hackable in the same way the previous HID iCLASS cards were. We’ll evaluate the difference across three axes: security, cost, and interoperability.īoth Seos and DESFire are considered the top-of-the-line in terms of security for encrypted card credentials. This is the most common question when it comes to evaluating Seos as DESFire appears to be very similar.

Desfire cards