Nov 21, 2016 When planning the security of a system, all of us developers love to get into the nitty gritty details of what NIST standards we’re implementing or the size of our keyspace. Unfortunately, this tendency can often end up resulting in missing the forest for the trees. By the same token, product managers can often make the dangerous mistake of believing that using a high difficulty randomly salted Argon2 password hash and 4096-bit RSA your application is automatically secure.

Nov 14, 2016 Encoding NFC tags has historically been a painful process for even the simplest of use cases. You could use a tool such as NXP Tag Writer on your Android device, but a mobile interface is very poor for many types of content creation. If instead you wanted to use a utility on your laptop or desktop, you were pretty much out of luck. Our Tappy Reader/Writer ChromeApp provides a multi-platform Chrome-based solution to this problemi using our TappyUSB readers, but what if you want to use TappyBLE devices or just want a standard native Windows application?

Oct 16, 2016 Lots of hotels, offices, and apartment buildings are now using NFC-based access control systems. As a result, plenty of people ask about the practicality of cloning their access card to produce a spare or emulating their card via an NFC-capable smartphone. In this article we’ll look into why, while theoretically possible, doing so is often not practical. Types of access control systems In order to discuss how NFC access control systems can be defeated, we must start with looking at how they work in the first place.

Mar 21, 2015 Toronto was recently named the best city to live in according to the Economist. This was a huge sense of pride for me and other Torontonians that call this city home. Alas, if you’re commuting in Toronto, try taking the streetcar and you’ll feel like you’ve traveled back in time to the 1930s. You won’t have the privilege to get on board unless you have the exact coin change, a TTC token, a paper transfer, or a TTC pass.

Mar 16, 2015 When customers or investors once asked us why we never entered the NFC payment space we respectfully replied with “if Google can’t make money in mobile payments, we certainly can’t.” This often ended that line of questioning quite painlessly. Although Google Wallet has some adoption, it never gained the widespread usage Google had hoped. As a symbolic white flag, Host Card Emulation (HCE) was introduced in Android KitKat in 2013 allowing third party developers to create similar apps.

Mar 2, 2015 So it’s 2015, and by many predictions and forecasts this would be the precipice of NFC ubiquity. Of course Apple is still weighing in on this fate, but assuming Apple plays nice and allows NFC to be used for more than payments we’re certainly on that path. Just having NFC hardware shipped with iPhones is a huge step forward, and this is why 2015 will be the year of NFC for TapTrack and other NFC companies, just not for the everyday consumer just yet.

Jan 8, 2015 NFC Event Badges at CES2015 These first two days at CES have been an amazing experience. I’ve met so many interesting people, seen some great innovative products and benefited from the amazing networking opportunities. I’ve also been terribly disappointed with the NFC event badges at CES. To be clear, I don’t mean the badges themselves but more so the infrastructure that supports their NFC capabilities. After first seeing ITN’s product at the NFC Solutions Summit in 2014, I’m not shocked at the cumbersomeness of the the solution.

Dec 28, 2014 2014 was a big year for the Near Field Communication (NFC) industry. The once chilly ecosystem is now warmed by the radiance of the ApplePay sun. Now that Apple has adopted the technology, the term NFC is no longer a four letter word in technology circles. I no longer need to start my elevator pitch to investors, clients or prospects with a preamble about what NFC is and how it works.

Although very exciting, the news today that the iPhone 6 will have NFC in the form of Apple Pay will not be the watershed moment for NFC that people hope. So far, Apple has not confirmed the inclusion of an all purpose NFC SDK that will let developers access more NFC features than those supported by the Apple Pay API. Since I’ve predicted that there will not be full access to all NFC modes, I will assume that no SDK for NFC will surface in the next ten days or so.

Unlike iOS apps, Android apps are subject to be run on a multitude of phone types. Generally, developers test on the most common phones and there exist many best practices that make apps more adaptive to various Android versions and devices and become almost device-agnostic. However, when developing NFC apps on Android, incompatibilities are more subtle and the Android SDK does not provide sufficient tools to compensate for device variance. The end result is that the NFC app may not work on devices with the same Android version on which developers tested it.