RONFC: A Novel Enabler-Independent NFC Protocol for Mobile Transactions

Abstract

The use of near field communication (NFC) technology for contactless mobile transactions has become popular in the past decade with the availability of this technology in mobile devices. Today, there are millions of the NFC-enabled mobile handsets in the market, with mobile handset manufacturers and mobile network operators enabling m-wallet solutions using the secure elements (SEs) that they own, thus can remotely control, on the devices. While this approach gives full control to the SE owner to activate any mobile transaction system on a device, having a more flexible approach would increase the benefits that end users could obtain from this technology in a variety of use cases. In this paper, we introduce a novel protocol for the NFC-based mobile transaction procedure, which uses tamper-resistant SEs that are already installed at the transaction terminals, and is mobile handset manufacturer and mobile network operator-independent. We evaluate and show the feasibility of the use of our proposed model with common mobile electronic payment scenarios. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed solution is promising for adoption as a secure NFC transaction model, which will have applications in various security-sensitive IoT scenarios, including but not limited to, mobile identification, healthcare, payment, and access control.