Mobile ticketing with NFC management for transport companies. Problems and solutions

In this paper we analyze the problems that are encountered in mobile ticketing systems where proximity technologies are used for validation and check of the e-tickets, leaving out the stage of ticket purchase, which can be done either remotely or in proximity. We have identified several security issues that are common in mobile ticketing and we propose some methods to solve them. In addition, we propose a protocol to provide secure validation and check of e-tickets. The innovation of this protocol is that it provides a good level of security and it is sufficiently abstract to be independent of NFC operating mode; that is it works in classical Card Emulation mode making use of Secure Element and it is implementable in Peer-to-Peer mode too.