Near Field Communication Security concerns & applicable security in Android

Abstract: Near Field Communication (NFC) is being used more frequent in smart devices, this raises security concerns whether the users information is secure from attackers. The thesis examines the threats that NFC on Android smartphones are exposed to, its countermeasures, as well as existing protocols that ensures the integrity and confidentiality of the users data. The results were achieved by a literature study, a questionnaire sent to companies that create products related to the subject as well as an experiment that was divided into two parts. The first part examined what information can be extracted from a debit card stored on an Android smartphone. The second part included a relay attack in which a purchase would be made with a victim’s debit card by using Android smartphones. The results shows that it is difficult to conduct any attack on the smart devices because of the limited range of NFC as well as the protocols available for making purchases with debit cards stored on smart devices disallows unauthorized applications and hardware to attack cards stored in smart devices.