A secure lightweight protocol for NFC communications with mutual authentication based on limited-use of session keys

Nowadays, mobile phones are equipped with enhanced short-range communication functionality called Near Field Communication (or NFC for short). NFC requires no pairing between devices and suitable for transferring small amount of data in very limited area. A number of researchers proposed authentication techniques for NFC communications but they still lack some necessary security properties, especially mutual authentication.. This paper introduces new authentication protocols for NFC communication that provides mutual authentication between connecting devices. Mutual authentication is a security property that prevents replay and man-in-the-middle attack. The proposed protocols deploy limited-use offline session key generation and distribution technique to enhance security and importantly make our protocol lightweight.