A Trusted Platform Module for Near Field Communication

Abstract

Near Field Communication (NFC) has become widely available on smart phones. It helps users to intuitively establish communication between local devices. Accessing devices such as public terminals raises several security concerns in terms of confidentiality and trust. To overcome this issue, NFC can be used to leverage the trusted-computing protocol of remote attestation. In this paper, we propose an NFC-enabled Trusted Platform Module (TPM) architecture that allows users to verify the security status of public terminals. For this, we introduce an autonomic and low-cost NFC-compatible interface to the TPM to create a direct trusted channel. Users can access the TPM with NFC-enabled devices. The architecture is based on elliptic-curve cryptography and provides efficient signing and verifying of the security-status report. As a proof-of-concept, we implemented an NFC-enabled TPM platform and show that a trust decision can be realized with commodity smart phones. The NFC-enabled TPM can effectively help to overcome confidentiality issues in common public-terminal applications.