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iPhones Will Reportedly Get the Power To Unlock Doors Using NFC (engadget.com)
The iPhone's NFC chip will soon have the ability open your house's and car's doors, as well as pay for your fare, reports The Information. From a report: The tech giant is reportedly gearing up to introduce a huge update for its devices' near-field communication chip, which is (at the moment) mostly used to make purchases via Apple Pay. Its employees already have access to the new features, the publication says, and have apparently been using their iPhones to access offices and buildings at Apple's HQ in Cupertino. While you can use iPhones to open a lot of smart locks via Bluetooth, NFC is considered the more secure option. According to the publication's sources, Apple has been working with HID Global, the company that made its security systems, to give iPhones the capability to gain access to buildings and offices since 2014. The company has reportedly been talking to transit card maker Cubic for years, as well.
my Android phone from 2014 has that.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
I can hear the advertisement now.
Now Apple(and whoever they sell the information to) can know where I live, what time I got home, what time I left, what mode of transport I took, what I bought and where, and criminals can now hijack not just my bank account but my home, my car and my transit pass horrraaa!
once Microsoft Amazon Google Apple (MAGA) convince you to discard your books, your music discs, your house keys, your car keys, and the ability to pay for anything other than through them -- the enslavement will be complete. Now be a good citizen and comply... your papers, please?
I understand why Apple locked down hardware interfaces on their devices back when you plugged most accessories into the bottom of your phone, but why do they still continue to do it now in the era of wireless? For example, the Bluetooth interface still doesn't let you open a serial port profile with another Bluetooth device unless you have paid silly amounts of money to get your product through MFI. What bad thing is my app accessing a wireless bluetooth serial port device going to do that I cannot do with a TCP/IP port onto the internet?
They relaxed things a tiny bit with BTLE, but they ensured the data rates on this were painful slow to the point of excluding a huge class of use cases. And then they ditched the headphone jack which removed a common hack used to get a signal in/out of iDevices. A whole world of external devices controlled by your phone would have been available to use years ago if Apple had had a reasonable wireless hardware policy (or at least had simplified its MFI program - you can't even find out how much it costs until you sign your life away).
Again, I totally understand the original motivation for regulating hardware devices, but with most of the devices people want to connect to being wireless that now seems redundant, and since Apple doesn't appear to be interested in building their own IOT ecosystem, I don't even see what they are gaining financially from the situation. If they opened up the bluetooth SPP there would an explosion in hardware gadgets that you can control with your iPhone.
NXP pretty much owns NFC so its a standard where you pay one company...
Apple previously has only allowed reading from a NFC chip and restricted the ability to write/respond to Apple pay
If apple opens this up then why would banks use or sign up for "Apple pay" ? (spoiler they wont)
the smart thing to do would to engage the phones bluetooth controller via NFC and have bluetooth open the door.
(this solves the locality issue where bluetooth controller is not sure if you wish to open the door or has to constantly ping wondering if its near the door and if you wish to open it)
Also Bluetooth allows you to choose your own encryption and Apple have a standard already for doors ("Homekit" which has strong encryption ) this would be a simple extension of homekit for offices which would be an additional revenue model...
Officekit - you heard it here first...
regards
John Jones
I was hoping to bring the airtight security of smart phones to my car and dwelling.
Sorry, but I put a NFC sticker inside my iPhone case years ago, thereby enabling it to open my front door.
I'd prefer an app to identify the owners of all those cats who come visiting my porch every day.
NFC on Android has been around for 5 years. Apple is once again lagging Android, and going to try to spin it as "revolutionary" even though 75% of all smart phones have been doing this for half a decade.
Courage?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Finally, one less thing to root around for in the morning to make me late for work. I really want to throw away my keys and wallet. I can remember arcane bits of 60's sitcom trivia and Maxwell's equations, but I never seem to remember where I put and keys and wallet the night before. There have been halting efforts for digital driver's licenses. Of course, loose your phone then and you are deeply hosed. With no wallet, good luck getting money from the bank to buy a new phone (master digital token) to bootstrap you life back. Plus, I've always hated badges ("we don't need..."). Once everyone is opening doors with phones there will less and less argument for those horrible status symbols hanging off your belt - and one less thing to forget in the morning.
thanks for bringing people the future. Albeit 5 -6 years later then everyone else.
The potential cost of getting hacked just keeps going higher and higher.
And I wonder how long it will be before some bright light in law enforcement tries to make the case that if you let your phone open your car (or home), you've given up your right to refuse entry to those places to nosy people with badges, as long as they can find some legal pretext to demand access to the device itself.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
NXP do own Mifaire technology that is what is used in most door opening scenarii. But, NFC (aka ISO/IEC 1809 & ECMA-340 ) are standardized Open (read Open Standard) solution. Although most chipset do support both, on lot of phones (say Samsung for instance), only NFC is enabled because of royalties disputes between the manufacturer and NXP. Most Mifaire standards are known for security issues. But you know, most people still use pin-based lock which most of them can be oppenned in a bunch of minutes with innexpensive tools. So ...
Anyway, in all the application I've designed that required NFC, our customer decided to either drop the feature (because iOS lacked NFC support) or simply dropped the iOS application. In most cases it was a casus belli that ends the iOS device predominancy at the corp.
Finally, one less thing to root around pockets for in the metro to make me more likely to be caught.
The hotel chain has been pushing the idea of electronic locks for several years. The 1700 Hilton properties that currently use these locks allow you to unlock doors as a feature of their reservation app. It's a nice feature, but will get a lot more useful when it operates from NFC directly, rather than having you go into the app and bring up the Digital Kay tab. An NFC implementation would allow you to open doors hands-free, which would be nice to have at conferences when you're always carrying miscellaneous things.
Provided it is 2FA, fine.
If NFC is the single factor, someone needs to end up in jail. This would be irresponsible to ship for a security product that doesn't include other protections which aren't part of the iWhatever.
There are lots of bad ideas and Apple has certainly forced a few onto their customers. If Apple were so smart, you wouldn't need so may converters would you just to use Apple computers and iWhatever stuff.
Like that trollop from the commercial. Now you can open every school locker, Janitors closet, and everyone trunk as well as screwing up science experiments. How did anyone think that put the product in a good light? One youngster hoses down tons of people and we think this is a good idea? Pffft. Catering to Egos of undeveloped adolescents. Was probably put out there to start the discussion on how to do it safely, and WE are being crowdsourced to help them solve the issue? Now... you swipe a phone, then you are in their door, and can start their car.. and buy things.. What could go wrong?
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
Well, as long as the phone prompts for biometrics before unlocking the door or starting the car, as is done with payments -- and how it's done on Android -- it's reasonably safe.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." (Dave takes out iPhone)
Who gives a flying fu*k, It's not like this is going to be backwards compatible with most of the HID installations in place already. A lot of those existing installations rely on older RFID technology in the hundreds of killohertz, its why you can't read your HID prox card with the NFC in an android phone. NFC works in the 13mhz band.
This is going to be a complete flop on apple's part unless they can convince the millions of office buildings to upgrade their RFID badge readers to be compatible with the 13mhz NFC frequencies.
Snipet from an article about NFC and RFID
Passive RFID tags primarily operate at three frequency ranges:
Low Frequency (LF) 125 -134 kHz
High Frequency (HF)13.56 MHz
Ultra High Frequency (UHF) 856 MHz to 960 MHz
Near-field communication devices operate at the same frequency (13.56 MHz) as HF RFID readers and tags. The standards and protocols of the NFC format is based on RFID standards outlined in ISO/IEC 14443, FeliCa, and the basis for parts of ISO/IEC 18092. These standards deal with the use of RFID in proximity cards.
I can predict some problems and i'm only 2% blockchained AI.
ISO/IEC 1809 is covered by patents its not "free" just because its a standard does not mean anyone can implement it...
japanese iOS products have an enhanced NFC chip that implements Felica by Sony. Felica is the beezknees for wireless almost-touch applications like transit and convenience store payments. But part of why Felica is superior is the heavily locked down infrastructure. If Apple lets devs into the NFC chip, then by extension they will start feeling up the Felica specific portions, which might end badly...