NFC peer to peer secure services for smart cities: LLCPS concepts and experiments with smartphones

Abstract

Proximity communication technologies, such as NFC (Near Field Communication) are today widely deployed in smart city environments. Contactless services based on NFC facilities are used for payment, transport or access control applications. There are supported by most of mobile operating systems. The NFC Peer to Peer mode is typically used for pushing small pieces of information in applications like Android Beams, or Personal Health Device Communication (PHDC), a family of devices comprising blood pressure meters, blood glucose meters, or body weight scales. Security (i.e. mutual authentication, data privacy and integrity) is a critical topic for P2P exchanges; however it is not specified by today standards. In order to solve these issues we introduced a security protocol (LLCPS) compatible with NFC standards and based on the well known TLS protocol. This Chapter describes an experimental platform built with commercial smartphones and presents some performances.