A Lightweight Security Protocol for NFC-based Mobile Payments

© 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V. In this work, we describe a security solution that can be used to securely establish mobile payment transactions over the Near-Field Communication (NFC) radio interface. The proposed solution is very lightweight one; it uses symmetric cryptographic primitives on devices having memory and CPU resources limitations. We show that our approach maintains the security of NFC communications and we further demonstrate that our solution is simple, scalable, cost-effective, and incurs minimal computational processing overheads

Towards NFC payments using a lightweight architecture for the Web of Things

The Web (and Internet) of Things has seen the rapid emergence of new protocols and standards, which provide for innovative models of interaction for applications. One such model fostered by the Web of Things (WoT) ecosystem is that of contactless interaction between devices. Near Field Communication (NFC) technology is one such enabler of contactless interactions. Contactless technology for the WoT requires all parties to agree one common definition and implementation and, in this paper, we propose a new lightweight architecture for the WoT, based on RESTful approaches. We show how the proposed architecture supports the concept of a mobile wallet, enabling users to make secure payments employing NFC technology with their mobile devices. In so doing, we argue that the vision of the WoT is brought a step closer to fruition

A New Secure Lightweight Authentication Protocol for NFC mobile Payment

As mobile applications grow, securing these applications become an important factor for their success. Especially, when these applications are related to financial transactions. Nowadays, mobile payment that is based on NFC technology is considered one of these important topics. In this paper, we propose A New Secure and Lightweight Authentication Protocol for NFC mobile Payment (NSLA) protocol. NSLA protocol presents a new method to update the users’ identities and the valid session keys, which preserves the privacy and ensures the integrity of the system. The presented performance analysis shows that NSLA protocol satisfies low computation overhead. Moreover, the security analysis proves that NSLA protocol has an immunity against replay attack, brute force attack, denial of service attack, and others types of attacks

Performance Analysis of SAP-NFC Protocol

The operations cost of authentication session is considered as strict indicator to evaluate the authentication protocols side by side with the security requirements achievements in the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. The secure authentication protocol for the NFC mobile payment systems (SAP-NFC) one of the recent authentication protocols that have proposed to achieve high level of security features such as the fully mutual authentication, anonymity and untraceability. Moreover, the SAP-NFC protocol can prevent the current security attacks. This paper, analyzes the performance of the SAP-NFC protocol comparing with the other recent NFC mobile payment protocols in the NFC devices that are included in the system. The performance analysis has illustrated that the SAP-NFC protocol not only supports strong security features, but also offers low cost in term of amount of computations

Face Recognition for Payment and Information Sharing

We have seen the emergence of various payment and information sharing methods with the rapid digitization of such services. Payment methods like NFC, Credit/Debit card, and QR code-based have become very common. These methods were intended to provide secure, safe and faster transactions. Although these have succeeded in their intentions up to some extent, there are various factors that are posing problems like confusion, time consumption, security threat, fraud, and theft. When it comes to sharing contact information and social media handles, visiting cards are still preferred but this is not the most reliable method as one either tends to lose these cards or has to store this information manually on their phone. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the various available methods for making mobile payments and sending contact details as well as the challenges faced. Furthermore, we discuss and compare alternative available technologies like face recognition that can be implemented

Securing Cyber-Physical Social Interactions on Wrist-worn Devices

Since ancient Greece, handshaking has been commonly practiced between two people as a friendly gesture to express trust and respect, or form a mutual agreement. In this article, we show that such physical contact can be used to bootstrap secure cyber contact between the smart devices worn by users. The key observation is that during handshaking, although belonged to two different users, the two hands involved in the shaking events are often rigidly connected, and therefore exhibit very similar motion patterns. We propose a novel key generation system, which harvests motion data during user handshaking from the wrist-worn smart devices such as smartwatches or fitness bands, and exploits the matching motion patterns to generate symmetric keys on both parties. The generated keys can be then used to establish a secure communication channel for exchanging data between devices. This provides a much more natural and user-friendly alternative for many applications, e.g., exchanging/sharing contact details, friending on social networks, or even making payments, since it doesn’t involve extra bespoke hardware, nor require the users to perform pre-defined gestures. We implement the proposed key generation system on off-the-shelf smartwatches, and extensive evaluation shows that it can reliably generate 128-bit symmetric keys just after around 1s of handshaking (with success rate >99%), and is resilient to different types of attacks including impersonate mimicking attacks, impersonate passive attacks, or eavesdropping attacks. Specifically, for real-time impersonate mimicking attacks, in our experiments, the Equal Error Rate (EER) is only 1.6% on average. We also show that the proposed key generation system can be extremely lightweight and is able to run in-situ on the resource-constrained smartwatches without incurring excessive resource consumption

NFC Secure Payment and Verification Scheme with CS E-Ticket

As one of the most important techniques in IoT, NFC (Near Field Communication) is more interesting than ever. NFC is a short-range, high-frequency communication technology well suited for electronic tickets, micropayment, and access control function, which is widely used in the financial industry, traffic transport, road ban control, and other fields. However, NFC is becoming increasingly popular in the relevant field, but its secure problems, such as man-in-the-middle-attack and brute force attack, have hindered its further development. To address the security problems and specific application scenarios, we propose a NFC mobile electronic ticket secure payment and verification scheme in the paper. The proposed scheme uses a CS E-Ticket and offline session key generation and distribution technology to prevent major attacks and increase the security of NFC. As a result, the proposed scheme can not only be a good alternative to mobile e-ticket system but also be used in many NFC fields. Furthermore, compared with other existing schemes, the proposed scheme provides a higher security

The survey on Near Field Communication

PubMed ID: 26057043Near Field Communication (NFC) is an emerging short-range wireless communication technology that offers great and varied promise in services such as payment, ticketing, gaming, crowd sourcing, voting, navigation, and many others. NFC technology enables the integration of services from a wide range of applications into one single smartphone. NFC technology has emerged recently, and consequently not much academic data are available yet, although the number of academic research studies carried out in the past two years has already surpassed the total number of the prior works combined. This paper presents the concept of NFC technology in a holistic approach from different perspectives, including hardware improvement and optimization, communication essentials and standards, applications, secure elements, privacy and security, usability analysis, and ecosystem and business issues. Further research opportunities in terms of the academic and business points of view are also explored and discussed at the end of each section. This comprehensive survey will be a valuable guide for researchers and academicians, as well as for business in the NFC technology and ecosystem.Publisher's Versio

SBVLC:Secure Barcode-based Visible Light Communication for Smartphones

2D barcodes have enjoyed a significant penetration rate in mobile applications. This is largely due to the extremely low barrier to adoption – almost every camera-enabled smartphone can scan 2D barcodes. As an alternative to NFC technology, 2D barcodes have been increasingly used for security-sensitive mobile applications including mobile payments and personal identification. However, the security of barcode-based communication in mobile applications has not been systematically studied. Due to the visual nature, 2D barcodes are subject to eavesdropping when they are displayed on the smartphone screens. On the other hand, the fundamental design principles of 2D barcodes make it difficult to add security features. In this paper, we propose SBVLC - a secure system for barcode-based visible light communication (VLC) between smartphones. We formally analyze the security of SBVLC based on geometric models and propose physical security enhancement mechanisms for barcode communication by manipulating screen view angles and leveraging user-induced motions. We then develop three secure data exchange schemes that encode information in barcode streams. These schemes are useful in many security-sensitive mobile applications including private information sharing, secure device pairing, and contactless payment. SBVLC is evaluated through extensive experiments on both Android and iOS smartphones