A new NFC mobile payment protocol using improved GSM based authentication

Mobile payments have received a lot of attention because they are available at any time and place. One of the various payment methods is Near Field Communication (NFC) mobile payment. As a result of potential problems that may arise using mobile payments such as fraud and information theft, the security of mobile payment protocols is pivotal. One of the critical stages in mobile payment security is the mutual authentication between the user and the Mobile Network Operator (MNO). Global System for Mobile (GSM) proposed a protocol to mutual authentication using symmetric key cryptographic method. In this paper, we have introduced a new protocol for NFC mobile payment, which improves the GSM authentication protocol due to the existence of symmetric cryptographic security threats, and uses an asymmetric encryption method to mutual authentication. Also, this protocol reduces the number of required key-pairs for authentication. Furthermore, our proposed protocol, increases resistance to attacks such as replay attack, DOS, eavesdropping attacks, repudiation, man in the middle attack and de-synchronization. Because mobile devices have limited resources and processing power, our proposed protocol reduces the signalling overhead and processing load of the client-side as much as possible.