Card Emulation via OpenNFC

Question

I am currently researching the possibility of card emulation on NFC enabled smartphones. Basicly, what I'm trying to do is use the phone for a reconfigurable physical access system. While reading the api as far as I understand the approach, the card emulation works via the antenna and the operatingsystem of the smartphone without using and relying on the secure element. But I'm actually totaly unsure about this.

Has anyone been able to use card emulation via the Open NFC softwarestack? I'm completly lost on this one, as it has a very confusing documentation style and offers no examples for the card emulation case.

Also, if someone had been able to use it, I'd realy love to know if there are anye requirements I have to meet with a phone for it to work.

Answer 1

So as it seems like noone could give a definitive answer, at least I was able to answer my question via other channels. Here's what I found out.

Basically, the OpenNFC software stack is designed to work with any hardware through the help of a hardware abstraction layer. This HAL is currently only supplied for their own SecuRead and MicroRead Chipsets. So out of the box it is not possible to use it.

For the card emulation case on Android: As many of you know it is normally not possible to use card emulation mode without the help of a secure element. What I was looking for is some sort of software card emulation possibility. This may be supplied with Cyanogenmod 1 (there were some nightly builds where it was activated, you can find furhter Information on this by checking this project here: NFCProxy 2). Very recently (actually exactly the day I asked my question), these features were ported to work with Jelly Bean in the newest version.

Answer 2

On most Android phones, card emulation will be turned off. On some of them it will be directed towards the embedded secure element (Google Wallet) or to the SIM (Cityzi and Quicktap wallet).

OpenNFC offers the possibility of doing card emulation by the host (theoretically), but some performance problems could surface.

The other problem is that most of current Android phones include NXP chipsets, which OpenNFC cannot drive.

If you wish to perform card emulation, you should look at EasyNFC which lets you build a NFC application in a SIM.