Secure data transmission between an NFC tag and an NFC enabled smartphone (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2015 in the subject Computer Science - Internet, New Technologies, Royal Holloway, University of London, course: Msc Information Security, language: English, abstract: NFC technology is considered extremely secure for communication and the number of phones that can support NFC is also at a rise. The technology is gaining worldwide recognition and as it is easy to implement and since it is really economical numerous applications are using it. Most of NFC applications involve the usage of tags, which can easily be duplicated or can be replaced by a fake one. Therefore, though the technology is so useful and secure, this weakness makes it vulnerable to certain attacks.

NFC has numerous applications but in this thesis, I will be discussing various security threats related to NFC applications involving NFC tag and an NFC enabled smartphone, for example smart posters. This thesis will evaluate various security threats like phishing, exposure to adult content etc., what they are and how an attacker can carry out these attacks. Further discussion will be on what an artificial neural network (ANN) is and how it can be used to eliminate these threats. The thesis also proposes a security model that will use ANN, to provide security against threats and will also provide user confidentiality, anonymity and privacy, and a category classifier to increase the overall efficiency of the model and to decrease the memory usage, and will also provide users with an added feature of personalizing their security according to their requirements.