A secure credit card protocol over NFC
Oliver Jensen, Mohamed G. Gouda, Lili Qiu · 2016
NFC ("Near Field Communication") is a short-range wireless communication channel. The current NFC credit card protocol allows a contactless credit card to communicate wirelessly with a Point-of-Sale in order to perform a purchase. This protocol is vulnerable to four common attacks: eavesdropping, skimming, relay attacks, and compromised Points-of-Sale. The attacker's objective is twofold: stealing sensitive information, and performing unauthorized. We use stepwise refinement to design a secure NFC credit card protocol which defends against all four of these attacks. The resulting protocol does not use heavyweight cryptographic operations, instead using only inexpensive primitives such as pre-computed hashes, indexing, and XOR operations. Moreover, it explores the lower-bound of computation required on the card to mount an effective defense against these four classes of attacks. As such, the energy and computational requirements of the credit card in our protocol are kept to a minimum.