A HCE-Based Authentication Approach for Multi-platform Mobile Devices

Mobile devices are able to gather more and more functionalities useful to control people’s daily life facilities. They offer computational power and different kinds of sensors and communication interfaces, enabling users to monitor and interact with the environment by a single integrated tool. Near Field Communication (NFC) represents a suitable technology in the interaction between digital world and real world. Most NFC-enabled mobile devices exploit the smart card features as a whole: e.g., they can be used as contactless payment and authentication systems. Nevertheless at present heterogeneity in mobile and IoT technologies does not permit to fully express potentialities of mobile devices as authentication systems, since most of the proposed solutions are strictly related to specific technological platforms. Basing on smart payment card approach, Europay, MasterCard e VISA (EMV) protocols and Host Card Emulation (HCE) technology, the current work proposes a distributed architecture for using NFC-enabled mobile devices as possession factor in Multifactor Authentication (MFA) systems. The innovative idea of the proposal relies on its independence with respect to the specific software and hardware technologies. The architecture is able to distribute tokens to registered mobile devices for univocally identifying user identity, tracing its actions in the meanwhile. As proof of concept, a real case has been implemented: an Android/iOS mobile application to control a car central locking system by NFC.