Practical provably secure key sharing for near field communication devices

Abstract

We present a novel practical and provably secure key sharing scheme for Near Field Communication (NFC) devices. The scheme is based on sharing secret keys using the noisy wireless channel. We present two schemes based on the different modes of operation of typical NFC devices. Our numerical results establish the achievability of vanishing secrecy rates using the proposed techniques. Implementation of our proposed schemes on NFC-enabled Android and Nokia phones verifies our theoretical analysis and demonstrates the efficiency of our techniques in mitigating attacks at the expense of a minimal increase in the link setup time and a small loss in goodput. In addition, the proposed techniques have the advantage of both increased secrecy and goodput as the data packet length increases. This highlights their suitability for a wide range of NFC applications.