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

Mobile devices are able to gather more and more functionalities use- ful to control people's daily life facilities. They offer computational power and different kinds of sensors and communication interfaces, enabling users to mon- itor and interact with the environment by a single integrated tool. Near Field Communication (NFC) represents a suitable technology in the interaction be- tween 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 devic- es as authentication systems, since most of the proposed solutions are strictly related to specific technological platforms. Basing on smart payment card ap- proach, Europay, MasterCard e VISA (EMV) protocols and Host Card Emula- tion (HCE) technology, the current work proposes a distributed architecture for using NFC-enabled mobile devices as possession factor in Multifactor Authen- tication (MFA) systems. The innovative idea of the proposal relies on its inde- pendence with respect to the specific software and hardware technologies. The architecture is able to distribute tokens to registered mobile devices for univo- cally 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.