Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1. Introduction
Recent years have seen an expansion in the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in industrial sector helping to streamline logistic processes in particular. Near Field Communication (NFC) is a spinoff of RFID with an aim to bring contactless communication for everyday use. NFC is a radio frequency interface intended for interactions between tags and electronic devices in very close proximity. In addition to its primary purpose of use, i.e. contactless identification, NFC also enables payment and ticketing applications and data exchange. The most prominent target device to act as an NFC reader seems to be a mobile phone, although currently NFC is also spreading towards other kinds of electronic appliances and uses, such as automatic pairing and configuration of computer peripherals. NFC is a radio communication technology operating in the open 13.56 MHz frequency band with 106-424 kbps data transfer speeds. The passive tags are
978-0-7695-3526-5/09 $25.00 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICDS.2009.43 89
Network driven NFC services allow mobile applications to be more lightweight and less complex when compared to their terminal driven counterparts. Using the network driven service model, the complex logic of NFC services can be carried out at network and only the results have to be returned back to mobile device. This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses our research motivation and related work. Section 3 presents our proposal for NFC gateway protocol as an enabler for network driven NFC services. We then go further to discuss protocol security. Section 4 describes our gateway protocol implementation. We open discussion and contemplate on future work in section 5. Section 6 finally concludes the paper.
90
Figure 1. NFC gateway request protocol Sender ID and NFC Tag ID fields compose the Identification field. The Sender ID field identifies the sending party, whereas the NFC Tag ID carries the canonical identification number (CID) of the read tag itself. These two ID fields are used for service selection by the NFC gateway. The length of the Header field is 32 bits. Header field divides into 8 bits for Payload type, 4 bits for Major and Minor Version each and 16 bits for Length. Identification field has 32 bits for Sender ID and 64 bits for NFC Tag ID. Maximum sizes of 64 bits for NFC Tag ID and 32 bits for Sender identification information are well enough.
might be used to provide endpoint authentication and communication privacy. The time interval between two sequential connections to a NFC gateway might be even days. That is why the same socket connection cannot be used. One of main objectives of designing NFC gateway protocol was to provide lightweight and quickly responsive software. TLS negotiation can turn out to be a rather tedious process particularly in case the mobile application has to make a new TLS negotiation every time when it connects to a server. This will eventually slow down the application as well. Figure 3 illustrates a proposal for NFC gateway key negotiation process. Our suggestion is to use TLS only when the first connection to a gateway is established and additionally every time when the getaway requires it. If the TLS connection is successfully established, the client receives a new session ID and a private key. These two keys are then used in the future to identify the user and to encrypt the message with a symmetric algorithm such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).
Figure 2. NFC gateway response protocol Response protocol on the other half is made up only of a header field. Like the request protocol, it also consists of Payload, Major version, Minor Version, Flags and Length. Length field is not currently in use but is reserved for future use. Response protocol is depicted in Figure 2. Payload, Major Version, and Minor Version fields are same as in request protocol. Flags field is a bit field and it contains result of request status. This field is also used to request more information to NFC gateway service. Length field contains only the size of the response message.
Figure 3. NFC gateway key negotiation. After the successful TLS negotiation, Login function is called. Login has a Sender ID as a parameter. Client receives new values of Session ID and Private key calling Startsession function. These two variables can be used in the future to provide secured connection between the client and the NFC gateway. Client can disconnect the TLS connection after it has received a new key pair. In Figure 4, a new secured gateway request protocol structure is illustrated. The green area of protocol is
91
encrypted with symmetric algorithm such as AES. 128 bits is the block size of AES thus padding field is needed to make plaintext length divisible by 128. Sender ID is removed from secured request protocol because it is redundant information. During the key negotiation (Figure 3) Session Key is related to a Sender ID.
single contact identifier. Contact addresses have different priorities depending on the situation. Normally user has to change contact priorities manually which can become laborious or user may even forget to carry out these updates. We have sought to improve the procedure by attaching RFID tags to different communication devices. In our implementation, we have used RFID tags to tell the service where we want our incoming calls to be routed. A tag can be attached for example to a workplace desk, a car dashboard and a home door. The tag can be read by an NFC client. The client then sends the service request message to the NFC gateway, which knows the locations of each and every RFID tag. As the NFC gateway receives the sender ID and RFID tag ID information, it will know where to route all incoming phone calls for that user. Our implementation is illustrated in Figure 5.
Figure 4. Secured NFC gateway request protocol. The sequence number is a counter. NFC gateway must ignore all the packets having smaller sequence number than the biggest one received so far. It will prevent third party from recording the packets and sending them again to the NFC gateway The session ID field locates inside and outside of the encrypted packet. The NFC gateway must check that the session ID inside the encrypted packet is the same as the session ID outside of the encrypted packet. This practice will prevent tampering of the Session ID and it will provide the packet integrity.
92
ENUM server. The NFC gateway knows what to do after it has verified Sender ID and NFC tag ID. In our solution the NFC gateway generates an update request directing incoming calls to a VoIPclient, a desk phone, a mobile phone or a voicemail.
and prospects. We have also successfully implemented the protocol in ENUM environment as a proof-ofconcept. NFC gateway service protocol provides service operators a convenient and flexible way to deliver and administer services for their customers. Assigning services to certain tags and certain customers is straightforward.
7. References
[1] Near Field Communication Interface and Protocol, ECMA-340 NFCIP-1, 2nd edition, Dec 2004. [2] Near Field Communication Interface and Protocol -2, ECMA-352 NFCIP-2, Dec 2003. [3] NFC Data Exchange Format, NFC Forum Technical Specification, NDEF 1.0, July 2006. [4] NFC Record Type Definition, NFC Forum Technical Specification, RTD 1.0, July 2006. [5] Text Record Type Definition, NFC Forum Technical Specification, RTD-Text 1.0, July 2006. [6] URI Record Type Definition, NFC Forum Technical Specification, RTD-URI 1.0, July 2006. [7] M. Koskela, J. Ylinen and P. Loula, A Framework for Integration of Radio Frequency Identification and Rich Internet Applications, in Proc. 29th International Conference on Information Technology Interfaces, Cavtat, Dubrovnik, Croatia, 2007, pp. 691-695. [8] E. Rukzio, M. Paolucci, M. Wagner, H.H. Berndt, J. Hamard and A. Schmidt, Mobile Service Interaction with the Web of Things, in Proc. 13th International Conference on Telecommunications, Funchal, Madeira island, Portugal, 2006. [9] E. Haselsteiner and K. Breitfu, Security in Near Field Communication (NFC), in Workshop on RFID Security, Graz, Austria, 2006. [10] H. Knospe and H. Pohl, RFID security, Information Security Technical Report, 9(4), 2004, 39-50. [11] J. Klensin, Ed. The History and Context of Telephone Number Mapping (ENUM), IETF RFC 3245, March 2002.
6. Conclusion
There is a steadily growing demand for mobile contactless communication services on a global scale. NFC seems to be the most prominent candidate for contactless communication technology on a mobile phone. Different kinds of NFC applications and frameworks have already been suggested and piloted by academic and commercial actors. Until now, there has been a distinct lack of research on operator-scale NFC service creation and delivery. In this paper we have proposed a new gateway service protocol for Near Field Communication network services and discussed related security issues
93