Mobile Payment Chips Could Let Hackers into Your Phone

because you don't need to have the user do anything," said Miller. In contrast, in order to compromise a computer or non-NFC phone, criminals typically have to trick users into doing something out of the ordinary, such as opening a Web page or e-mail attachment they shouldn't.

Miller's Android NFC hack was made possible by a feature called Android Beam, which allows phones with NFC chips to exchange photos and other data. An NFC-equipped phone can send a URL to another when the two are tapped together, and the receiving device will open the page without offering the user a chance to decline. Miller created a passive NFC tag that mimicked a phone using Android Beam to send a Web address, and made use of a bug in Google's browser previously discovered by researchers at security startup CrowdStrike to gain control (see "How a Web Link Can Take Control of Your Phone").

NFC interactions typically require being within four centimeters of a phone, says Miller, so using such attacks against a person in the street would be difficult. "A more realistic attack is replacing an NFC reader

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