Card Emulation via OpenNFC

android nfc hce open-nfc
Dekker picture Dekker · Aug 31, 2012 · Viewed 8.2k times · Source

I am currently researching the possibility of card emulation on NFC enabled smartphones. Basicly, what I'm trying to do is use the phone for a reconfigurable physical access system. While reading the api as far as I understand the approach, the card emulation works via the antenna and the operatingsystem of the smartphone without using and relying on the secure element. But I'm actually totaly unsure about this.

Has anyone been able to use card emulation via the Open NFC softwarestack? I'm completly lost on this one, as it has a very confusing documentation style and offers no examples for the card emulation case.

Also, if someone had been able to use it, I'd realy love to know if there are anye requirements I have to meet with a phone for it to work.

Answer

takumar picture takumar · Sep 14, 2012

On most Android phones, card emulation will be turned off. On some of them it will be directed towards the embedded secure element (Google Wallet) or to the SIM (Cityzi and Quicktap wallet).

OpenNFC offers the possibility of doing card emulation by the host (theoretically), but some performance problems could surface.

The other problem is that most of current Android phones include NXP chipsets, which OpenNFC cannot drive.

If you wish to perform card emulation, you should look at EasyNFC which lets you build a NFC application in a SIM.

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