Recently, the appearance of public NFC tags are growing in major populated areas
ID: 657861 • Letter: R
Question
Recently, the appearance of public NFC tags are growing in major populated areas. The company I am currently working along side with wants to increase their advertisements with a NFC tag placed on the side of their ad so users can navigate to their website and,want to later expand it to opening up the app store to download a specialised application.
How would one go about protecting the tags at that point? As these tags are available to purchase to the public and do not take two wits to program something simple & someone who specialises in programming can figure out a simple malicious hijack (there's a few which come to my head, for security sake I will not name)
So with the scenario that unattended public NFC tags, how to prevent malicious hijacking ie. Prevent person A from swapping out legit nfc tag with a malicious tag in its place?
Explanation / Answer
The two problems you are facing with NFC tags is either preventing a re-write of the tag by a malicious user, or the NFC tag being replaced by a malicious one in the advertisement.
The first problem can be resolved by using read-only NFC tags. These cannot be reprogrammed and thus thwart any attempts to modify the NFC tag contents.
The second issue is a bit harder to prevent and depends on the physical security of the advertisement. Embedding the NFC tag in such a way that it cannot be removed or, when removed, would invalidate the advertisement is one way to go. This is however specific to what that advertisement would look like. I would imagine if it's just a piece of paper, the NFC tag should be embedded in that piece of paper in such a way that if removed, the advertisement would have to be torn apart or something to that accord.
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