Development of an access control system using Near-Field Communication (NFC)

Abstract

Host-based Card Emulation (HCE) is main reason for developing NFC application of Android OS. It can replace the card emulation by using Secure Element (SE) when developers need to negotiate with SE manufacturer. This is more open for academia to develop in this field and take its benefits. HCE can support ISO/IEC 7816-4 protocol standard which is commonly used in the market. However, developers are still difficult to develop their application over this standard since third-party software is limited only to their products. Moreover, NFC library such as NFC shield currently supports only ISO 14443-4 protocol.

To pave the ways for developers, NFC-enable Android application is developed to emulate as NFC smartcard using HCE instead of 4 digits passcode of access control system. All passcodes are modified, encrypted and saved in internal phone storage as isolation system anytime. To test this application while developing, open source NFC library is extended over existing ISO standard’s library to help to track all procedures of this HCE application. ACR122U NFC reader is used to read HCE in this test as well as how ACR122U works on Windows platform over USB which it is not currently feasible. Lastly, developing the NFC library for NFC shield is based upon the ISO/IEC 7816-4 using NFC Forum Type 4 Tag Specification to support Arduino Uno board as NFC reader, then this built library for NFC shield is tested with Android application. There are three experiments in this work. The first experiment of Android application is to discovery data which storing in Android’s isolation system. The second experiment is to validate whether the application works correctly over protocol standard with extended open source library using ACR122U. The last experiment is to validate the built library of NFC shield for Arduino with HCE application. These last two experiments show the output data is the same as the passcodes of Android application.