Contactless Technology: RFID, NFC and Access Control

About this course

Every tap you make — a door, a bus, a hotel room, a tap-to-pay terminal, a TTA card at an outreach — is the same handful of technologies, and almost nobody who installs them can explain how they work. This course teaches the whole field properly and then puts you to work in it. You start with the physics: how a chip with no battery draws power from a reader's field, and why 125 kHz, 13.56 MHz and UHF behave completely differently. Then every chip family you will meet — EM4100, HID Prox, T5577, MIFARE Classic, Ultralight, DESFire EV2/EV3, NTAG213/215/216, ICODE, FeliCa, EPC Gen2 — and which to specify for which job, because choosing the wrong one is the most expensive mistake in this industry. From there it is projects: programming NFC tags from your phone, building an NFC business card, building tap-to-learn cards like the ones TTA hands out, phone and Mac automations, antenna and range engineering, a full door access control installation with readers, controllers, locks, wiring and OSDP, and a UHF inventory system. The last third is professional security work: why legacy credentials must be replaced, how contactless payment is really secured and why card cloning doesn't work the way films suggest, how to assess an estate you own or are authorised to assess with a Proxmark 3 Easy on macOS, and how to write the report. Authorisation in writing is a hard rule here, taught first and enforced in the final project. About 5 hours of core video, plus the hands-on builds.