Securing emerging short range wireless communications: the state of the art

As an emerging advanced short-range communication technology, near field communication (NFC) is undergoing a fast rate of expansion with many promising benefits including low power, small size, and peer-to-peer communication, without incurring complex network configuration overhead. However, current NFC technologies suffer from one practical limitation: almost all NFC-enabled applications require built-in NFC chipsets, and as a result such low levels of penetration of NFC hardware has stymied its applications on most mobile devices in the market, for example, smartphone and tablet platforms. In addition, from the security perspective the confidentiality of the transmitted data has not been satisfactorily addressed by current NFC technologies, which do not incorporate any security at the physical or MAC layers by assuming that the extremely short range of communication itself has offered a degree of protection physically. Therefore, great interest has been aroused in the practicality and security enhancement of NFC technologies. In this article we discuss alternative NFC technologies, with an emphasis on barcode-based NFC and acoustics-based NFC, which are compatible with legacy devices and existing infrastructure and can provide a high level of security guarantee. Following a brief overview of barcode-based and acoustics-based short-range communications respectively, for each technology we present the major technical hurdles to be overcome and the state-of-the-art, and finally offer a vision of the future research issues on these two promising technologies.