Card Emulation via OpenNFC

Question

I am currently researching the possibility of card emulation on NFC enabled smartphones. Basicly, what I'm trying to do is use the phone for a reconfigurable physical access system. While reading the api as far as I understand the approach, the card emulation works via the antenna and the operatingsystem of the smartphone without using and relying on the secure element. But I'm actually totaly unsure about this.

Has anyone been able to use card emulation via the Open NFC softwarestack? I'm completly lost on this one, as it has a very confusing documentation style and offers no examples for the card emulation case.

Also, if someone had been able to use it, I'd realy love to know if there are anye requirements I have to meet with a phone for it to work.

Stumbled upon this because (now Android 4.4 and above natively supports HCE, but) I'm looking for solutions for Android 4.3 and earlier versions. — ADTC, Jul 01 '15 at 05:15

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 14 '12 at 11:32

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On most Android phones, card emulation will be turned off. On some of them it will be directed towards the embedded secure element (Google Wallet) or to the SIM (Cityzi and Quicktap wallet).

OpenNFC offers the possibility of doing card emulation by the host (theoretically), but some performance problems could surface.

The other problem is that most of current Android phones include NXP chipsets, which OpenNFC cannot drive.

If you wish to perform card emulation, you should look at EasyNFC which lets you build a NFC application in a SIM.

answered Sep 14 '12 at 11:32

Toluene

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EasyNFC ist basicly an extension to the standard Eclipse IDE that makes it possible to write and test Javacard Applications. While that indeed is pretty nice as it's a free alternative, it does not really help that much if you don't have access to the secure element. And if you have a contract with some SIM vendor, they typically have their own IDE to work on this. Good example would be Giesecke & Devrient with their own JCS Suit and Sm@rtcaffee (or how ever that is spelled). – Dekker Sep 20 '12 at 09:32
"On some of them it will be directed towards the embedded secure element (Google Wallet) or to the SIM (Cityzi and Quicktap wallet)." do you mean that the ROM you have flashed affects this? would a ROM supplied by Orange (to enable quicktap) be incompatible with Google Wallet? – Sam May 19 '13 at 23:35

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 04 '12 at 09:14

So as it seems like noone could give a definitive answer, at least I was able to answer my question via other channels. Here's what I found out.

Basically, the OpenNFC software stack is designed to work with any hardware through the help of a hardware abstraction layer. This HAL is currently only supplied for their own SecuRead and MicroRead Chipsets. So out of the box it is not possible to use it.

For the card emulation case on Android: As many of you know it is normally not possible to use card emulation mode without the help of a secure element. What I was looking for is some sort of software card emulation possibility. This may be supplied with Cyanogenmod 1 (there were some nightly builds where it was activated, you can find furhter Information on this by checking this project here: NFCProxy 2). Very recently (actually exactly the day I asked my question), these features were ported to work with Jelly Bean in the newest version.

Card Emulation via OpenNFC

2 Answers2