NFC, ain’t that funny

When we invented NFC (Near Field Communication) we never intended it for some of the uses that it was put to afterwards. And when we started discussing those unconventional (for us) uses, we immediately pointed out all security problems and proposed methods to protect the NFC devices from various attacks. That was… probably 2004. Do you think anyone listened? Nope. After that, we put in a few years worth of work into some (ok, granted, fairly fuzzy for political reasons) guidance, standards and white papers in Ecma International and NFC Forum. Did anyone take notice? I don’t think so.

At the recent Black Hat security conference security researcher Charlie Miller detailed and demonstrated attacks to the NFC devices and showed how he can pown a mobile phone through a combination of NFC and browser attacks.

The reason? NFC is a new attack surface and it has to be protected, both by itself and in comnbination with all the other things that are operating in the same device. However, the usual thing has happened. People paid attention only to the hype of usefulness and ease of use of the technology but never paid attention to the security of it. Now the security will have to be added, again, as an afterthought.

Duh, the humanity.

Related articles

• Researcher wows Black Hat with NFC-based smartphone hacking demo (networkworld.com)
• Hackers May Use NFC Feature to Attack Phones (devicemag.com)