If you are in crowded place with a hacker around, your smartphone can be compromised by the attackers, by simply bumping into you.
A vulnerability has been discovered in near field communication (NFC) by a security expert at this year’s Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.
NFC, a wireless technology that establishes communication between phones through physical contact and is used in smartphones on Android platform, until now, but we’re expecting it in the new iPhone that is expected to launch.
Well-known Apple hacker and Accuvant researcher Charlie Miller wowed the crowed at Caesar’s Palace through a demo that involved infiltrating an Android phone by simply grazing it with a tag embedded with an NFC chip.
Once the phone was tagged, the browser opened to a mobile web page that gave Miller full access to the data on the device. He was also able to exploit the vulnerability already patched by Google.
Miller quoted, that he was more interested in researching on NFC because exploiting it doesn’t require user interaction and there has been little to no research done on it.
“I’m always looking for something to pick on,” he said.
“If you imagine a time when you’re always paying with your phone, these attacks would be everywhere,” he said. “Replacing NFC tags with malicious ones are totally realistic. It’s the equivalent of ATM skimming.”
“There is a way to make the technology more secure, such as prompting a user to opt in to each exchange they make, but the solution would affect the convenience of NFC,” Miller said.
“You would have to give up some of that convenience to make it more secure,” he said.
How scary do you feel to own the Next Generation phone with NFC?