Chapter 11. NFC and Secure Elements

This chapter gives a brief overview of near field communication (NFC) and secure elements (SEs), and explains how they’re integrated into mobile devices. While NFC has many uses, we focus on its card emulation mode, which is used to provide an interface to an SE integrated into a mobile device. Secure elements offer protected storage for private data, such as authentication keys, and provide a secure execution environment that can protect security-critical code. We’ll describe which types of SEs Android supports and introduce the APIs that Android applications can use to communicate with SEs. Finally, we’ll discuss host-based card emulation (HCE) and its Android implementations, and demonstrate how to implement ...

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