“Payment with mobile NFC phones” How to analyze the security problems

We present in this paper a method to analyze the security problems which can occur in a NFC mobile phone payment. In the first section, we give a simplified description of the technical realization for this pilot limited to a part of the system. In the second section, we present the security concepts as a major issue in this scenario. Roughly main requirement is to have same level of security as standard payment EMV transaction. The methodology described in the third section concerns the application payment and its communication with the payment terminal through a NFC link. This study, realized for the ITEA SmartTouch project, starts from a pilot experience that is carried out at Strasbourg in France, in 2007. This trial is the first experiment of a NFC-based payment application that fully supports the international EMV standard and the PayPass program. The end of this article presents different research perspectives to overstepping the encountered problems.