Practical Experiences with NFC Security on mobile Phones

In this paper we present our practical experiences in implementing a secure NFC application on mobile phones. First, we present the characteristics of the NFC technology and its security features. Based on our practical, real-world offline NFC voucher payment application, using the Nokia 6313 and 6212 NFC enabled devices, we illustrate the possibilities of NFC applications on today’s technology with an emphasis on the security aspects. In our experience, the current technology is not sufficient to provide for a completely secured system, which resulted in sub-optimal speed of our implementation. As the security protocols in our solution are PKI-based, we include some timings of the underlying cryptographic routines, to show that the actual slowdowns are not only caused by the heavy use of cryptography, but also by design decisions of the mobile phone manufacturer.