Near Field Communication and Security in Pervasive and Social Networks

Near Field Communication (NFC) is one of the short range technologies currently introduced in mobile phones. Besides emulating smart cards, it enables a wide range of short range applications, embedding social computation in physical space. Interesting security problems arise in many of them. With an imminent widespread deployment, NFC is an exciting application domain for some of the security research pursued at COMLAB.

I shall outline some of the security problems and solutions arising from NFC and other pervasive computation technologies, and describe the ways in which the standard security models need to be extended, in order to accommodate reliable security proofs. The incremental approach, deriving secure protocols together with the corresponding security proofs, developed in our previous work, turns out to be more needed than ever.