Accessing mobile SE in Android

Excellent, detailed tutorial on how to access the embedded secure element in an Android 4.x phone, and the followup on actually sending APDUs to it.

G&D microSD cryptocontroller

A new microSD card containing a secure element and cryptocontroller has been released by G&D. It supports ECC up to 521 bits (F_p, I assume, and not F_2m), AES-256 and SHA-512. The main functionality is strong authentication to allow secure phone calls.

Note: authentication is all well and good, but the security chain is only as strong as its weakest link.The main problem with open systems and mobile/ad hoc clients is key management, and I have yet to come across a practical, secure and dynamic solution in the Secure Voice market.

New developments

The contactless sector has now reached the start of the snowball phase, with several NFC pilot projects being announced weekly, new NFC devices being released (Inside Contactless, Infineon and G&D partnership)  bi-weekly, and new TSM service providers and brokers (Ericsson IPX: TSM) going public once a month.
Huge multinational customers are finally getting in on the action (Coca-Cola, Disney, Barclays, and many more).

If the current trend continues, I predict (based on my impressions, for what they're worth) further linear growth in R&D and market size until end Q2 2011. In the next two years we'll see most of the innovation taking place; market penetration rate should reach its peak at the end of 2012. I look forward to revisiting this prediction :)

Nokia NFC SDK

Nokia rolled out their 6131 NFC model around January 2007, aimed mainly at developers. To upload your own MIDlets to the phone you have to ask your dealer to factory unlock the phone, or do it yourself via an Unlock MIDlet (Nokia wiki listed below has a link) which will prevent it from working with trusted MIDlets and applets afterwards. Nokia makes up for this royal pain by offering a decent NFC and MIDlet SDK, and the developer community for their products is quite big and provides good support.

Good places to start reading:

• Official Nokia NFC SDK page
  
• Forum Nokia Documentation and Tools pages
• Forum Nokia wiki FAQ for 6131 NFC
  
• Nokia Secure Chip FAQ
• Nokia MIDlet development tutorial

At the time of this posting the PDF for the Nokia 6131 NFC SDK Programmer's Guide was not available via the official Nokia site, so instead I got it from the Uni. Lüneburg FTP along with the Nokia SDK and other docs. (All the guide PDFs and supporting documentation are included in the SDK.)

Note: Unlocked Nokia 6131 NFC phones all use the same key-set, namely

42/1/DES-ECB/404142434445464748494a4b4c4d4e4f
42/2/DES-ECB/404142434445464748494a4b4c4d4e4f
42/3/DES-ECB/404142434445464748494a4b4c4d4e4f

and security protocol is the GP default: SCP02 option 15 (CMAC+ENC, refer to Nokia 6131 NFC Technical Product Description v1.0 section 7.2, p 26). For JCOP Tools this translates to using ext-auth enc, while in GPShell you would use mode_211 and open_sc -security 3 [...] A detailed discussion with examples can be found on the Nokia Forum. For detailed definitions of SCP02 and its options, refer to Global Platform Card Specification 2.1.1 Appendix E.1.1, p213.