Website: www.iaik.tugraz.at
Manager: Manfred Aigner
Staff member: Martin Feldhofer, Sandra Dominikus, Thomas Popp
SNAP
Secure NFC Applications
SNAP was a follow-up project of ART. The project was supported by the Austrian programme FIT-IT Embedded Systems. SNAP was executed in a cooperative manner by four partners (IAIK, FH JOANNEUM, NXP Semiconductors Austria and EMT). The start of the project was February 2006 and it was successfully completed by 30.4.2008.
Project Description
Near Field Communication (NFC) is an upcoming short-range communication standard for mobile phones and other embedded systems like PDAs, or any other computing device with communication capability.
The applications using NFC follow the principle of “touching” communicating devices. This means that in contradiction to other contact-less communication technologies NFC stands for communication between devices that are brought closely together to share data. This very natural principle for communicating data is performed as direct peer to peer communication between one initiator and one target device. NFC applications can be seen as virtual counter piece to direct communication between two persons standing close together to share information. NFC allows for easy connectivity between devices without any complex setup procedure for the connection.
The objective of SNAP was to develop appropriate protection of NFC communication and to develop a demonstrator application that relies on the developed protection mechanisms. A mobile Coupon (mCoupon) system, which allows users to collect electronic coupons from passive tags, was designed and implemented as demonstrator. The system of mCoupons clearly demonstrates the need for proper data protection of all components. Within the project the following goals have been defined and achieved:
- A profound investigation of the threat eavesdropping for NFC communication between an active and a passive device (performed by EMT).
- Successful investigation of SCA attacks on RFID devices operating in the reader field (lead by IAIK).
- Development and implementation of protocols for protected mobile coupons that complies with the requirements of NFC and passive mCoupon issuers (by IAIK).
- Implementation of a neighborhood detector prototype that allows RFID readers and NFC devices for low-energy detection of nearby tags (concept & implementation by FH JOANNEUM).
- Implementation of two AES chip prototypes for passive RFID devices, one with and one without SCA countermeasures. An accurate evaluation of the costs and efficiency of SCA countermeasures has been performed on basis of two chips with the same functionality and interface (by IAIK).
- Design of a PC-based mCoupon demo systemfor Windows CE based PDAs. The demo system uses semi-passive tag prototypes (implementation by FH and IAIK) and a laptop with NFC interface.