Protecting NFC data exchange against eavesdropping with encryption record type definition

Abstract

Near Field Communication (NFC) is inherently vulnerable to eavesdropping and proximity hijacking attacks. NFC standards itself lack built-in security features against eavesdropping for all the modes of communication in NFC-ecosystem. This drives the application developers to implement customize security features on their own. These non-standard solutions in turn result in the system's security against vulnerabilities being subject to the developer's capability of designing a secure solution. Clearly, this model is a limiting factor in the widespread adoption and deployment of NFC applications. In this paper we propose a standard Encryption Record Type Definition (ERTD) to provide confidentiality to NFC Data Exchange format (NDEF). Subsequently, we develop a fully compliant prototype of our ERTD as a lightweight plug and play confidentiality middleware in the existing NFC communication architecture. Finally, we perform an in-depth performance evaluation, of different confidentiality related primitives that focuses on processing latency and data overheads.