Sebastian Hans Weblog

NFC services on the SIM, it's coming together

For several years now contactless or NFC services are a big buzz word among mobile operators. Putting contactless card applications in the secure and managed SIM card in a mobile phone has several advantages.

• The mobile phone can provide a nice User Interface

• Applications in the SIM card and in the terminal can communicate with each other, on a Java ME enabled phone this can be done via JSR 177
  

• The application in the card can be managed over the air, a technology widely used by carriers these days

• The SIM card and/or the terminal can communicate via the mobile network in a secure with a back-end infrastructure of a service provider.

However contactless services need an infrastructure and have to live in a world that has already deployed contactless cards and applications for years. So backward compatibility is the word that pops up here. Therefor it is necessary to develop a range of standards before these services can be deployed in a larger scale or even companies invest the money to develop the necessary devices and infrastructure.

Several standardization or industry organizations have worked over the last few years together to enable the SIM card as platform for these services :

• ETSI has developed the physical and logical link between the SIM card and the NFC modem in the terminal. These standards are called Single Wire Protocol (TS 102 613) and Host Controller Interface (TS 102 622).

• The respective test specifications for these protocols are in TS 102 694 and TS 102 695

• ETSI is also working on a dedicated Java Card(TM) API for the HCI protocol in TS 102 705

• In order to manage several contactless applications in the card, e.g. several payment applications, GlobalPlatform has developed “Amendment C for GP spec 2.2” this spec is available for public review

• EMVco is working on a specifications that defines how payment applications can be developed and deployed on a cards that support the previous standards and specifications

Posted at 03:31PM Nov 07, 2009 by Sebastian Hans in Java Card  |  Comments[1]