Getting into the middle of near field communication

Abstract

A recent development emanating from the widely used RFID technology is Near Field Com-munication (NFC). Basically, NFC is a popular short range (<10 cm) wireless communica-tion technology with applications in areas sensitive to security and privacy concerns including contactless payment. Since NFC communications require very close proximity between two communicating devices (for example, a smartcard and a reader), it is generally believed that Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks are practically infeasible here. On the contrary to this general belief, in this research, we successfully establish MITM attack in NFC communica-tions between a passive tag and an active reader. Here, we present physical fundamentals of the attack, our engineering design, and results of our successful implementation. We identify a potential vulnerability in existing contactless payment protocol due to separation between card authentication and transaction authorization phases. Exploiting this vulnerability an at-tacker is able to conduct transaction interchangeably using original and malicious card. Here, we present practical impacts of the attack from the perspective of how a malicious user can leverage our MITM attack to compromise integrity of contactless payment transactions. We elaborate the complete mechanism of the attack and describe pragmatic attack scenarios to accomplish the practical feasibility of the MITM attack over NFC communication. Through describing di erent pragmatic attack scenarios, we clarify the bene ciary and loser of this at-tack. After successfully establishing the attack, we perform rigorous experimental analysis to reveal di erent aspects of this attack. Finally, we propose a countermeasure to combat the MITM attack based on our experimental analysis. Our proposed countermeasure does not demand any additional hardware to be integrated with the existing system. We evaluate per-formance of our proposed countermeasure for defending the attack and demonstrate its e cacy in defending the MITM attack.