Attacks on the HF Physical Layer of Contactless and RFID Systems

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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

Security assessment of the Spanish contactless identity card

The theft of personal information to fake the identity of a person is a common threat normally performed by individual criminals, terrorists, or crime rings to commit fraud or other felonies Recently, the Spanish identity card, which provides enough information to hire online products such as mortgages or loans, was updated to incorporate a near-field communication chip as electronic passports do. This contactless interface brings a new attack vector for criminals, who might take advantage of the radio-frequency identification communication to virtually steal personal information. In this study, the authors consider as case study the recently deployed contactless Spanish identity card assessing its security against identity theft. In particular, they evaluated the security of one of the contactless access protocol as implemented in the contactless Spanish identity card, and found that no defences against online brute-force attacks were incorporated. They then suggest two countermeasures to protect against these attacks. Furthermore, they also analysed the pseudo-random number generator within the card, which passed all the performed tests with good results

An Ultra-Low-Power RFID/NFC Frontend IC Using 0.18 μm CMOS Technology for Passive Tag Applications

Battery-less passive sensor tags based on RFID or NFC technology have achieved much popularity in recent times. Passive tags are widely used for various applications like inventory control or in biotelemetry. In this paper, we present a new RFID/NFC frontend IC (integrated circuit) for 13.56 MHz passive tag applications. The design of the frontend IC is compatible with the standard ISO 15693/NFC 5. The paper discusses the analog design part in details with a brief overview of the digital interface and some of the critical measured parameters. A novel approach is adopted for the demodulator design, to demodulate the 10% ASK (amplitude shift keying) signal. The demodulator circuit consists of a comparator designed with a preset offset voltage. The comparator circuit design is discussed in detail. The power consumption of the bandgap reference circuit is used as the load for the envelope detection of the ASK modulated signal. The sub-threshold operation and low-supply-voltage are used extensively in the analog design—to keep the power consumption low. The IC was fabricated using 0.18 μ m CMOS technology in a die area of 1.5 mm × 1.5 mm and an effective area of 0.7 m m 2 . The minimum supply voltage desired is 1.2 V, for which the total power consumption is 107 μ W. The analog part of the design consumes only 36 μ W, which is low in comparison to other contemporary passive tags ICs. Eventually, a passive tag is developed using the frontend IC, a microcontroller, a temperature and a pressure sensor. A smart NFC device is used to readout the sensor data from the tag employing an Android-based application software. The measurement results demonstrate the full passive operational capability. The IC is suitable for low-power and low-cost industrial or biomedical battery-less sensor applications. A figure-of-merit (FOM) is proposed in this paper which is taken as a reference for comparison with other related state-of-the-art researches

Mobile applications approaches using near field communication support

Nowadays, the society is constantly evolving technologically and new products and technologies appears every day. These technologies allow the well-being of societies and their populations. Mobile gadgets evolution, mainly the smartphones, has always been at the forefront, everyday new devices appear and with them, more recent technologies. These technologies provide a better quality of life of everybody who uses them. People need to have at their disposal a whole array of new features that make their life increasingly more easily. The use of gadgets to simplify the day-to-day is growing and for this people use all disposal types of devices, such as computers, laptops, file servers, smartphones, tablets, and among of others. With the need to use all these devices a problem appears, the data synchronization and a way to simplify the usage of smartphones. What is the advantage of having so much technology available if we need to concern about the interoperability between all devices? There are some solutions to overcome these problems, but most often the advantage brought by these technologies has associated some setup configurations and time is money. Near field communication (NFC) appeared in 2004 but only now has gained the market dominance and visibility, everybody wants to have a NFC based solution, like Google, Apple, Microsoft and other IT giants. NFC is the best solution to overcome some problems like, file synchronization, content sharing, pairing devices, and launch applications without user interaction. NFC arises as a technology that was forgotten, but it has everything to win in every global solutions and markets. In this dissertation two based solutions are presented, an application to transfer money using NFC and an application launcher. Both solutions are an innovation in market because there are nothing like these. A prototype of each application was build and tested. NFC Launcher is already in Android Market. NFC Launcher and Credit Transfer were built, evaluated and are ready for use

Analysis of the latest trends in mobile commerce using the NFC technology

The aim of this research is to propose new mobile commerce proximity payment architecture, based on the analysis of existing solutions and current and future market needs. The idea is to change a Mobile Device into a reliable and secure payment tool, available to everyone and with possibility to securely and easily perform purchases and proximity paymentsThe research leading to these results has received funding by the ARTEMISA project TIN2009-14378-C02-02 within the Spanish "Plan Nacional de I+D+I", and the Madrid regional community projects S2009/TIC-1650 and CCG10-UC3M/TIC-4992

Dynamic modelling and control schemes for current-source resonant converters

Versió amb diverses seccions retallades, per drets de l'editorThis thesis focuses on the control methods applied to current source resonant converters, especially in two different applications of switching power supplies and wire-less power transfer systems. In fact, the existing applications are mostly working with voltage source resonant converters. For voltage-source resonant converters, many control strategies have been analyzed and investigated, turning this into a mature technology nowadays. The current-source resonant converter is an alternative solution as they offer well-known advantages such as non-pulsating input current, low stress for switches, simple driving circuitry, and short circuit protection capabilities. However, there is an obvious lack of control methods applicable to current-source resonant converters. In addition, obtaining an appropriate dynamic model to be used in control design is the other challenging issue in this field. Hence, the objectives of this thesis are used to fill these gaps. The proposed control schemes are: - Frequency modulation control scheme applied to a DC/DC current-source parallel resonant converter. - Sliding mode control scheme with amplitude modulation applied to a DC/DC current-source parallel resonant converter. - A control scheme for a multiple-output DC/DC current-source parallel resonant converter. - A communication-less control scheme for a variable air-gap wireless energy transfer system using a current-source resonant converter.Esta tesis doctoral está centrada en los métodos de control aplicados a los convertidores resonantes con fuente de corriente, especialmente en dos aplicaciones distintas como son fuentes de alimentación conmutadas y sistemas de transferencia de energía sin hilos. De hecho, las aplicaciones existentes trabajan principalmente con convertidores alimentados mediante fuentes de tensión. Para los convertidores resonantes con fuente de tensión, se han analizado muchas estrategias de control en la literatura, lo que hace hoy en día que esta sea una tecnología madura. El convertidor resonante con fuente de corriente es una solución alternativa, que ofrece ventajas conocidas como corriente de entrada no pulsante, baja tensión para interruptores, circuitos de conducción sencillos y capacidades de protección contra cortocircuitos. Sin embargo, existe una falta evidente de métodos de control aplicables a los convertidores resonantes con fuente de corriente. Además, otro desafío en este tema es la obtención de modelos dinámicos apropiados para el diseño del control. Por lo tanto, los objetivos de esta tesis se utilizan para llenar estos vacíos. Los esquemas de control propuestos son: - Esquema de control en frecuencia aplicado a un convertidor resonante paralelo con fuente de corriente para reguladores de tensión en continua - Esquema de control en modo de deslizamiento con modulación de amplitud aplicado a un convertidor resonante paralelo con fuente de corriente para reguladores de tensión en continua. - Esquema de control para un convertidor resonante paralelo con fuente de corriente para la regulación de tensión en continua de varias salidas. - Esquema de control sin comunicaciones para un sistema de transferencia de energía sin hilos con un transformador con entrehierro variable basado en un convertidor resonante con fuente de corriente.Postprint (published version

Joint Design and Co-integration of Antenna-IC Systems

An overview of design challenges for beamforming active antenna arrays, which are needed to meet high-performance demands of future emerging applications, is presented. The critical role of antenna element mutual coupling on the receiving system sensitivity of array receivers, and effective radiated power of MIMO-type array transmitters is discussed. Trade-offs, common misconceptions, and practical examples are shown and discussed. Techniques towards strong integration between antennas and LNAs/PAs that blurs the geometrical boundaries between them are presented. This will cover mm-wave antenna design examples, where direct matching of active devices to their optimal source/load impedances eliminates the losses of 50-Ohm impedance matching networks. An antenna-integrated high-efficiency (Doherty) PA, operating at the sub-6 GHz band and utilizing active load modulation, will be taken as an on-antenna power combining example, including optimization aspects and over-the-air characterization