An Off-the-shelf Relay Attack in a Contactless Payment Solution

The enhanced Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology called Near Field Communication (NFC), is a standards-based wireless communication technology. Passive NFC devices, such as contactless smart cards use NFC to communicate with other devices without any physical connection, or an internal battery source, deriving power inductively via the radio field generated by the NFC reader device. Nowadays, many Point-of-Sale (POS) terminals, credit cards and also mobile devices are NFC-capable and facilitate contactless payments. Thus, many security sensitive applications already use the contactless technology. A very important attack in the NFC security domain, is the relay attack. This work illustrates a practical relay attack on public transport POS terminals, using off-the-shelf mobile devices and hardware, and summarizes possible countermeasures against relay attacks in