Software Card Emulation in NFC-enabled Mobile Phones: Great Advantage or Security Nightmare?

Software card emulation is a new approch to advance the interoperability of NFC with legacy contactless smartcard systems. It has been first introduced to NFC-enabled mobile phones by Research In Motion (RIM) on their BlackBerry platform. Software card emulation aims at opening and simplifying the complex and tightly controlled card emulation functionality. While this form of card emulation, that gets rid of the secure element (a device tightly controlled by the "big players"), is a great chance for development of innovative NFC applications, it potentially makes card emulation less secure and paves the way for interesting attack scenarios. This paper evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of software card emulation based on existing application scenarios and recent research results.