Android NFC card emulation / use phone as card

Question

I'm searching for a way to send specific commands from my phone to a reader. I have already read that card emulation is not supported on android due to securtiy reasons, but it is possible via a firmware patch for android 2.3.4 on the Nexus S.

My main question is, do I really need card emulation to send defined APDUs to the reader and to recieve the answer APDUs or is there any other posibility maybe by misusing android Beam?
If I need to use card emulation are there any new insights? The last posts , few posts I found are nearly one year old...

As adiditional information in the end I will not have any control over the reader.

Thanks for answering and on any new insights on card emulation.

Answer 1

What you are trying to achieve is somewhat candid. The reason smart cards are being used in NFC is because the NFC protocol is built in such a way that it is not possible to know the correct response in advance. There is always a secret involved, and you can't just guess it. Otherwise there would be a major security flaw in all the systems using contactless smartcards (building access control,

You can't just spy on the protocol, save the exchanges, and replicate them in some software, on most applications this will fail. There will be some random value at some stage, and some crypto computation to perform.

In order to emulate a card with the phone, you need a secure element (smartcard chip on the phone or the SIM card in your phone), and you need the NFC chip in your phone to route card emulation APDUs to this secure element (this is probably what the patch you are referring to is doing).

There are ways to do card emulation in an Android application, but I suspect this will require substantial patching, and you will not have predictible response time, so your reader might not like it. Also this will prevent card emulation from working when your phone is off (battery delpleted for instance).

Answer 2

It's possible in Android KitKat 4.4. Check out this link, more information will be added soon I belive.

http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/nfc/hce.html