Near Field Communication Question

HI All

I was recently at a local Mall and sending a message on my BOLD 9900 when some guy walks by and swipes his cell phone pretty close to mine in a sweeping motion. I quickly realized that he might be trying to get some info from my BB and I quickly shut off all my connections. After doing so, I noticed that my NFC was turned on but I always have it off. He didnt come back in my direction but I did shut it off immediately and was wondering if this is something to worry about in the future and if there is a way to block this kind of action just in case info can get into the wrong hands. I am assuming that something can unknowingly transfer this way. Any words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated. Especially if Blackberry themselves are visiting, please comment!

thanks in advance

That is a very good question, especially to a NFC rookie like me. Having this will be a new thing and I'm anxious to learn all I can.

As far as I know, the only way to turn NFC on is for you to do it from your own phone. I doubt he could access it with any normal consumer or even tricked up electronic device.

Others in the know may correct me, but I don't think even the weak Android security would allow something that simple to occur via a walk by.

If nothing else, note that it wouldn't work if the separation between the back of his device and the back of yours was more than about 1cm. If he wasn't so totally in your personal space that you could have called mall security, then there's practically no chance anything he might have tried with NFC would work.

Even with his phone right next to yours, he can't steal data through it.

NFC requires two parts:

- a listener app on his
- an output app on yours

I would be much more worried about my Cell Radio, Bluetooth and Wifi communications if I were you.

All 3 can be sniffed down to the bits being sent for communication. And in order for your phone to communicate with any device, it needs to submit authentication information. That information is traceable and can be replicated. And most anything built using common encryption can be decrypted the same way. Check out WEP cracking.

Ed

Sent from my BlackBerry 9360 using Tapatalk

NFC heists are impossible unless you are participating by clicking okay.

For NFC specifically, even if you hold the devices back to back, they won't activate the NFC chip on either device if it was turned off. I remember this from when I was playing with my friends' BBs and mine.

Also, NFC may have been turned on accidently by you when trying to turn off/on other connections.


I wouldn't give this much thought unless you're some big company's CEO or a military general ;) I really doubt someone has broken through BlackBerry's security.

Okay thanks everyone!