A novel secure protocol for near field communication

Abstract

In the recent years, the popularity and demand for the Near Field Communication (NFC) applications are skyrocketing. However, NFC is vulnerable to numerous networking attacks including relay attack. Current security protocols used in NFC technology is not adequate to provide sufficient security for all applications. In this work, we introduce a security based processing technique for NFC to help receivers protect their devices and data from several attacks. The proposed secure protocol for NFC consists of certificate based NFC Data Exchange Format (NDEF) message. The proposed protocol processes all incoming NDEF messages and then stores them in handset memory. The secure protocol checks the authenticity of the sender. In this work, we also explore NFC and Bluetooth technology by transferring different datafiles. Experiment results suggest that NFC technology helps save time and power when to compare with Bluetooth technology. While transferring a file size of 2.6 MB, NFC consumes 17.54 watt/second less than what Bluetooth consumes. For a 1.6 MB file, NFC takes 13 seconds less than the time Bluetooth takes. Simulation results show that the proposed secure protocol can handle different sized NDEF messages efficiently. The processing time of the proposed protocol does not increase linearly as the record size increases. Although the average processing time due to the proposed protocol is slightly longer than the existing protocols, the proposed protocol offers better security over the existing protocols by detecting certificate modification, message modification, etc. The proposed secure protocol for NFC can be extended to implement the secure protocol in embedded chips.