Assessing Relay Attacks in NFC Enabled Devices A Three Factor Relay Test Environment (RATE) Approach

Near Field Communication (NFC) is an advancement of inductively coupled proximity Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology and smart card technology. In our work we demonstrate proximity based relay attack simulations, within a University campus test environment. Consequently, the experiment required the use NFC enabled mobile devices of the Android and IOS operating systems. We produced attack simulations on different proximity relay ranges confirming how easy it is becoming to compromise these mobile payment devices by way of eavesdropping, and deliberately forcing unauthorized access to the point that our results challenges the ISO 14443 standard definition on the NFC ranges as counter-intuitive. Our efforts contend the need for the standards on range proximity as the underlying goal of our study. In this context the research sought to answer three (3) research questions namely: 1. To what extent can you evaluate a relay attack on an NFC mobile device near ranges? 2. To what extent can you evaluate a relay attack on an NFC mobile device within far ranges? 3. How does the results compare in questions (1) to question (2)?