Practical Relay Attack on Contactless Transactions by Using NFC Mobile Phones

—Contactless technology is widely used in security sensitive applications, including identification, payment and access-control systems. Near Field Communication (NFC) is a short-range contactless technology allowing mobile devices to act primarily as either a reader or a token. Relay attacks exploit the assumption that a contactless token within communication range is in close proximity, by placing a proxy-token in range of a contactless reader and relaying communication over a greater distance to a proxy-reader communicating with the authentic token. It has been theorised that NFC-enabled devices could be used as a generic relay attack platform without any additional hardware, but this has not been successfully demonstrated in practice. We present a practical implementation of an NFCenabled relay attack, requiring only suitable mobile software applications. This implementation reduces the complexity of relay attacks and therefore has potential security implications for current con...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: IACR
• Authors: Lishoy Francis, Gerhard P. Hancke, Keith Mayes, Konstantinos Markantonakis
• Keywords: Access Control Systems, Control Transactions, Field Communication, IACR 2011