A website dedicated to contactless payment systems

Mifare emulation has been around for some years. Mifare emulation simply refers to an application running on a chip card operating system. The application emulates the native mifare chip and responds the mifare readers as if it is a mifare chip. Of course there are some considerations when implementing a mifare emulation. First of all, it is not native mifare and the terminal software needs to be updated accordingly to recognise the chip. Secondly, mifare emulation is not as fast as a native mifare chip so some parameters must be updated to transact with the mifare emulation applet.

These have been done since some time, but Gemalto has started a new era by implementing the DESFire application on a SIM/UICC. Even the owner of the technology -NXP, does not officialy have DESFire emulation yet. It’s a huge thing in terms of innovation. However there’s still some time before a DESFire enable transportation system is to accept an NFC handset device with a Gemalto SIM/UICC.

Gemalto has been aggressive on the contactless market almost since its start and this is clearly a result of it. Read the full press release here.

ACS announced its new dual interface smart card ACOS7. ACS is a Hong Kong based company working on smart cards and readers. Their product portfolio is quite strong, they almost have everything that you can imagine. I especially love the card readers of ACS.

ACOS7 seems an addition to their ACOS family optimised for transportation. It has 8 kb of application memory which is pretty suitable for a transportation applications. ACOS7 has almost every feature you’d expect from a dual interface card product positioned for transportation; from hardware based random number generator to support for ISO7816 Part 4 file structures:  transparent, linear fixed, linear variable, cyclic which are essential for transportation logging mechanisms.

I got the impression that ACOS7 is especially targeting the Chinese market, but I think they could do quite well in Europe, too.

Contactless chips for limited use have been popular in public transportation for some years. NXP, just like in mifare case, has been leading this market with mifare ultralight. Ultralight chips have limited memory and no crypto support, but have OTP (one time programmable) memory area which is perfect for enabling the restriction the limited use of the ticket. Later on NXP developed a next generation of Ultralight, which is called Ultralight C. Ultralight C supports 3DES in addition to its elder brother Ultralight. Good.

Of course, Ultralight is not the only product in the market. Infineon, as one of the strongest players in the semi-conductor manufacturers have a great product as a competitor to NXP’s Ultralight family called my-d move. my-d move is a member of my-d family of Infineon and has 128 bytes of memory for application and supports 32 bit password for authentication. It also supports password re-try counter feature against brute force attacks. Unlike Ultralight C, my-d move does not have any keys stored in the chip, but has a secure code which is written at the time of issuing the chip. Secure code is authenticated at the time of using the chip along with the password.

One great future of my-d move is, just like Mifare Ultralight, the support for NFC Type 2 Tag Operations. This practically means that my-d move can interact with NFC devices like handsets or other contactless readers. This opens a whole new world for these products. Infineon positions the product as a limited use media like single trip ticket for transportation or event ticketing. Imagine tickets for a rock music event being formatted by a cell phone on an over-the-air service. my-d move and Ultralight opens a gate for enabling projects like this. You can create the ticket with a mobile phone and then send the ticket data to central host over GPRS/3G connection of the mobile handset. You can also validate/invalidate tickets via NFC handsets. Great opportunity. One great addition to this would be the usage of the ticket for buying a drink inside the event. Or think of voting for polls displayed on kiosks with contactless readers and people voting and identifying themselves with the contactless ticket.

Basicly, my point is that these chips are great for any type of ticketing, not limited to limited use for transportation.

A recent post on Near Field Communications Group on Linkedin states that Apple is working on some prototype iPhones which have contactless reader. Here’s the full post:

A recent post on Near Field Communications Group on Linkedin states that Apple is working on some prototype iPhones which have contactless reader. Here’s the full post:

Had to share this news. A highly reliable source has informed me that Apple has built some prototypes of the next gen iPhone with an RFID reader built in and they have seen it in action. So its not full NFC but its a start for real service discovery and I’m told that the reaction was very positive that we can expect this in the next gen iPhone. If Apple does it, expect every phone manufacturer and their sister to begin pumping out NFC enabled phones, at least for service discovery and sync. This just reinforces what we knew based on the two seperate patents Apple submited that had the iPhone enabled to read RFID tags. I’m told that the touch project video and the BT SIG’s specs were all driving forces to push this forward as well as other factors. Guess I’ll be touching my iPhone to my Mac to link them together to sync iTunes by next year.

Nokia has been the leader of NFC innovations in the handset world, but if this happens to be true Apple may go far ahead. And at the same time, it will definitely lead to a boom in NFC applications.

According to the post on NFCNews, Nokia release its first NFC handset which holds the NFC application on the SIM card, rather than the handset itself.

Well, let’s go through the concepts first. We can say that the heart of an NFC system is the secure element. Secure element refers to the IC (integrated circuit) which hosts the application, which stores the data and communicates the NFC reader. The data stored in the secure element can be financial balance, cardholder data, ticket contract details (on a transport ticketing application), etc and it’s protected by at least DES or TDES keys. The physical communication layer is actually an antenna attached to the handset. In the first generation NFC handsets, both the secure element and the antenna was integrated into the handset.

The place of the secure element actually directs us to the party who controls what application to install or what application not to! If you define the secure element as the SIM card, that means that the owner of the SIM card -which is the mobile network operator- decides what applications will be installed for using with the contactless interface. Before the introduction of the Single Wire Protocol (SWP), this was almost impossible. And there was no business model, either. Now it’s quite clear. Thanks to ETSI, now there’s a standard for this and I think that this will eventually lead to a SIM-Centric NFC world.

On an NFC event held in Istanbul, Turkey on May 27-28, product manager from Nokia (I can not remember his name, sorry) told that at least half of the Nokia phones would have NFC capability in 2-3 years. (I can not remember the exact figures either, but it was something around this, maybe even more) This means that a lot of people will have a contactless device in their hands -even if they don’t want to- and there will be a huge battle for installing an NFC application on a phone. I asked him if Nokia would have both SIM-Centric and handset-centric phones or not. He responded in a very politically correct manner that the market will decide on this.

Just imagine what can you do with this power: You can top-up your transportation card, use it with your phone, check the balance any time from your phone. You can display the last 2-3 transactions from your phone, which bus or tram did you take last time and how much did it cost. You can even top-up by using your airtime. It opens a whole new world, things are shining on the bright side. And this is all happening by using OTA services provided by the network operator.

However, there is a dark side of course. Third party application owners and developers need to negotiate with the mobile network operators. They can not do anything that the operator is not happy with. Let’s say you have a distribution channel and you have a project for adding NFC support so that people will have the chance to use their NFC enabled phones for downloading content. Well, you need to deal with the operator(s) and try to find a way to find a business case for the operator. Good luck.

Briefly, it seems we will have a SIM-Centric NFC world coming and need to prepare for this.