NFC-RFAE: Semi-supervised RF Authentication for Mobile NFC Card System

With the increase of the near field communication (NFC) function deployment on smartphones, the mobile NFC card system becomes a solution to inadequacies of conventional physical authentication in accommodating modern Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios involving shared access, like shared family bank cards and household vehicles. While NFC technology brings convenience to these scenarios, it also introduces security vulnerabilities, including relay attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks. Given the multi-user context, these vulnerabilities are further amplified. Therefore, it is urgently needed to design an authentication for securing the mobile NFC card system. However, existing security approaches, such as protocol authen-tication and supervised radio frequency (RF) authentication, face challenges in computational resource allocation and data labeling, making them inadequate for the multi-user mobile NFC card system. To address these issues, this paper proposes NFC-RFAE, a semi-supervised authentication system based on RF signals, demonstrating high accuracy, high recall rate, low latency, and minimal space occupancy in real-life scenarios, including a vehicle keyless system and a mobile bank system.