NFC-based Mobile Payment Protocol with User Anonymity

Abstract

Following the developments of wireless and mobile communication technologies, mobile-commerce (M-commerce) has become more and more popular. However, most of the existing M-commerce protocols do not consider the user anonymity during transactions. This means that it is possible to trace the identity of a payer from a M-commerce transaction. Luo et al. in 2014 proposed an NFC-based anonymous mobile payment protocol. It used an NFC-enabled smartphone and combined a built-in secure element (SE) as a trusted execution environment to build an anonymous mobile payment service. But their scheme has several problems and cannot be functional in practice. In this paper, we introduce a new NFC-based anonymous mobile payment protocol. Our scheme has the following features:(1) Anonymity. It prevents the disclosure of user's identity by using virtual identities instead of real identity during the transmission. (2) Efficiency. Confidentiality is achieved by symmetric key cryptography instead of public key cryptography so as to increase the performance. (3) Convenience. The protocol is based on NFC and is EMV compatible. (4) Security. All the transaction is either encrypted or signed by the sender so the confidentiality and authenticity are preserved.