Near Field Communication (NFC) is a promising short distance radio communication technology for many useful applications. Although its communication range is short, NFC alone does not guarantee secure communication and is subject to security attacks, such as an eavesdropping attack. Generating a shared key and using symmetric key cryptography to secure the communication between NFC devices is a feasible solution to prevent various attacks. However, conventional Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol is not preferable for resource constrained NFC devices due to its extensive computational overhead and energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a practical, fast and energy-efficient key agreement scheme, which uses random bits transmission with waveform shaking, for NFC devices by exploiting its off-the-shelf full-duplex capability. In the proposed method, two devices send random bits to each other simultaneously without strict synchronization or perfect match of amplitude and phase. On the contrary, the method randomly introduces synchronization offset and mismatch of amplitude and phase for each bit transmission in order to prevent a passive attacker from determining the generated key. A shared bit can be established when two devices send different bits. We conduct theoretical analysis on the correctness and security strength of the method, and extensive simulations to evaluate its effectiveness. We build a testbed based on USRP software defined radio and conduct proof-of-concept experiments to evaluate the method in a real-world environment. It shows that the proposed method achieves a high key generation rate of about 26 kbps and is immune to eavesdropping attack even when the attacker is within several centimeters from the legitimate devices. The proposed method is a practical, fast, energy-efficient, and secure key agreement scheme for resource-constrained NFC devices.

Practical Secret Key Agreement for Full-Duplex Near Field Communications

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a promising short distance radio communication technology for many useful applications. Although its communication range is short, NFC alone does not guarantee secure communication and is subject to security attacks, such as eavesdropping attack. Generating a shared key and using symmetric key cryptography to secure the communication between NFC devices is a feasible solution to prevent various attacks. However, conventional Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol is not preferable for resource constrained NFC devices due to its extensive computational overhead and energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a practical, fast and energy-efficient key agreement scheme, called RIWA (Random bIts transmission with Waveform shAking), for NFC devices by exploiting its full-duplex capability. In RIWA, two devices send random bits to each other simultaneously without strict synchronization or perfect match of amplitude and phase. On the contrary, RIWA randomly introduces synchronization offset and mismatch of amplitude and phase for each bit transmission in order to prevent a passive attacker from determining the generated key. A shared bit can be established when two devices send different bits. We conduct theoretical analysis on the correctness and security strength of RIWA, and extensive simulations to evaluate its effectiveness. We build a testbed based on USRP software defined radio and conduct proof-of-concept experiments to evaluate RIWA in a real-world environment. It shows that RIWA achieves a high key generation rate about 26kbps and is immune to eavesdropping attack even when the attacker is within several centimeters away from the legitimate devices. RIWA is a practical, fast, energy-efficient, and secure key agreement scheme for resource-constrained NFC devices.

Practical secret key agreement for full-duplex near field communications

A wireless connection may be established between a mobile device and a reader device and/or a sensor. The reader device and/or sensor may authenticate the mobile device. The reader device and/or sensor may receive a credential or token from the mobile device. An action may be performed based on certain criteria such as if the credential or token is valid.

Control system and method

Near field communication (NFC) is widely used today in many useful applications, such as contactless payment, identification, and file exchange. Due to the limitations on computation, power, and cost of NFC devices, NFC systems often lack encryption or are weakly encrypted, leaving them exposed to security attacks. One solution for this problem is to install strong cryptographic protocols on NFC devices. However, it involves upgrading and revoking deployed NFC devices, which is costly and impractical. Moreover, encryption algorithms are usually considered expensive for resource constrained NFC devices in terms of computation overhead and energy consumption. Aiming at a solution to tackle the security threat without revoking or changing the insecure NFC devices, this paper investigates whether the recent advance of physical layer security can be applied as a means to secure NFC. A detailed analysis is performed to reveal two unique challenges brought by NFC’s data transmission mechanism. A practical solution, SecNFC, through special waveform design at the initiator is proposed. Extensive simulations and concept-proof experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of our solution. Both simulation and experimental results show that SecNFC can efficiently prevent NFC from eavesdropping with a slight and tolerable decoding performance degradation at the initiator.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ielaam/10206/8372863/8353854-aam.pdf

Secure Inductive-Coupled Near Field Communication at Physical Layer

Near Field Communication (NFC) is widely used today in many useful applications, such as contactless payment, identification, and file exchange. Due to the limitations on computation, power, and cost of NFC devices, NFC systems are often lack of encryption or weakly encrypted, leaving them exposed to security attacks. One solution for this problem is to install strong cryptographic protocols on NFC devices. However, it involves upgrading and revoking deployed NFC devices, which is costly and impractical. Moreover, encryption algorithms are usually considered expensive for resource constrained NFC devices in terms of computation overhead and energy consumption. In this paper, aiming at securing NFC from eavesdropping at physical layer, we propose SecNFC, a solution that changes the signals on the initiators to hide the communications, but does not require any changes to the targets. In this work, for the first time, we address a practical problem of synchronization offset between two NFC terminals, which can be exploited by an eavesdropper to compromise the transmitted bits. SecNFC takes into consideration the synchronization offset and solves the challenge by introducing blocking signals around the transition point when the target switches load between on and off. With this solution, even with the existence of synchronization offset, eavesdroppers cannot extract any bit information from eavesdropping. We conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of SecNFC. We also build a testbed based on USRP software defined radio and off-the-shelf NFC tags to evaluate SecNFC in a real-world environment. Both simulation and experimental results show that SecNFC can efficiently prevent NFC from eavesdropping with a slight and tolerable decoding performance degradation at the initiator.

SecNFC: Securing inductively-coupled Near Field Communication at physical layer

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a new short-range wireless communication technology that enabled simple, security and intuitive peer-to-peer communication between NFC-enabled devices. The advent of NFC has given rise to several interesting applications under short-range radio technology. Among the interesting applications, mobile payment is the first application in the marketplace. In the research, we proposed NFC-Micro SD technology, a new technology in NFC field. The new technology creates a more convenient environment and lower threshold for mobile payment to enter in. The collaborative mobile payment solution follows the original security mechanism of the traditional credit cards operation, and improve the value of the partners in the collaborative value chain, included the hardware produced and software development. The two modes, passive mode and active mode, provided by NFC-Micro SD technology also provide the reliable transaction for the mobile payment. In summary, the NFC mobile payment solution via NFC-Micro SD technology improves the higher acceptance, using willingness, and loyalty of the partners and users. It also makes the value chain as the collaborative solution. Thus, the NFC mobile payment via NFC-Micro SD technology can be seen as the better mobile payment solution and will lead the development of the mobile payment market.

Szu-Hui Wu

Papers

Promoting Collaborative Mobile Payment by Using NFC-Micro SD Technology