A website dedicated to contactless payment systems

Gemalto announced that Gemalto joined the Open Handset Alliance. I  find this a very good news for the NFC world.

Android platform was an initiative by the Open Handset Alliance. Almost all of the researches point out that Android will be one of the most popular mobile operating systems of (very near) future. Android runs not only on mobile phones but a range of mobile devices varying from netbooks to internet tablets. I believe Android will penetrate into more devices like running on  embedded systems.

So what does Gemalto’s joining to Open Handset Alliance mean in terms of contactless systems? First of all, Gemalto is the first and only company on secure payment and identification technology in the alliance. Gemalto is clearly the biggest company that has the expertise on the application level security for payment/identification chips, which I believe will boost the NFC implementation on Android OS. Gemalto has all the necessary know how and sources for developing a generic NFC API for Android which will encourage handset manufacturers for more handsets supporting NFC. On the application level, this will lead the huge Android developer community to implement many NFC applications – and not only payment.

Since it’s now widely believed that next generation iPhone will have some kind of contactless interface, now almost all major mobile platforms (Symbian- of course, iPhone and now Android) will have native support for NFC.

In my perspective, NFC was the rising star of the Mobile World Congress 2010. In the first day of the event, the agenda of the session was mobile money. A balanced selection of speakers from carriers to technology companies provided a mind opening content.

The first outcome of the day for me was that NFC is something that you can not expect a single task, but there is a need for companions. I mean, a simple mobile wallet application will not be enough for people to make it a killer application. Mobile coupon style add-ons as well as making the content accesible to user through the handset is crucial. People already have credit cards, debit cards, transportation cards, etc for making the payment. Why would the user have switch it to a handset instead of a card?

Secondly, all the parties are ready to jump on the band wagon but it still needs some time for the boom. We’ve already seen many pilots and even a commercial roll out in Japan, but there’s still some more time ahead.

Mobile World Congress 2010 had also an NFC event for platinum pass holders with a Samsung handset.

It was interesting to see that SIM cards are having more and more abilities for mobile payment applications. Gemalto announced a new SIM card which is able to run a DESFire ticketing application. I also had a product presentation of a SIM platform with NFC support from Giesecke&Devrient.

Finally, BarclayCard announced an iPhone application which can accept contact EMV chip cards with the PIN support. Just like the US version running from magnetic stripe interface, Barclay’s one has a contact chip card reader attached to the iPhone and the terminal software runs on the iPhone OS.

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.

Access control applications and transportation systems were the “killer applications” that caused the boom in the contactless cards. Access control systems are generally do not require anything more than a unique id, but transportation systems are more complex.

Speaking generally, two products dominate the contactless transportation installations: NXP‘s mifare family and the Calypso family, which are famous from the ISO 14443 Type A and B, by the way. Mifare has been dominant for years, but with the security leak that was imposed by the German CCC has been quite a barrier for Mifare lately. NXP responded with Mifare Plus, which is a product designed for migrating the current systems without changing the card media. I think it’s a very good move.

In the last 3-4 years, we saw that banks are trying to penetrate into the contactless transportation systems. Unfortunately the technology that the banks have -EMV- can not respond to the transportation ticketing requirements. Both Visa and MasterCard are working on this.

On the other hand, I saw a very interesting news on Near Field Communications World.com about GlobalPlatform‘s new task force on transportation systems.

I think this will eventually lead to more standardized schemes in the transport ticketing world. Both NXP and Calypso already have compliant products with GlobalPlatform. But the effort that the GlobalPlatform itself will make more efficient affect, not just on the cards, but the readers and terminals as well. It’s also important in terms of NFC based payment scenarios in the transportation since the GSM world will be using a SIM-centric systems based on GlobalPlatform standards.