NFC Payments: How Secure Are They Really?
NFC payments have been on the rise for a while now, especially now that we are living through a pandemic and ‘contactless’ everything is the way to be. However, there have been some concerns about the safety of payments executed via this particular method. Thankfully, NFC payments are inherently secure, thanks to the following measures:
1. Validation: This is one of the strongest measures in NFC’s arsenal against fraudulent activities and works similarly to EMV chip cards’ validation process. What happened here is that once a connection is initiated between the customer’s smartphone or contactless card and the NFC terminal, the safe element chip inside either the device or the card must validate the transaction in question. The transaction cannot be executed without validation. It must also be noted that this method doesn’t involve the transfer of card data between the card/smartphone and the reader; instead, an individual digital signature is allotted for each payment.
2. Proximity protection: It is not news that an NFC contactless payment solution operates over short distances. That would pose countless risks, yes? Actually, no; allow us to explain. You see while NFC payments do work over short distances, but those distances are short, i.e. a matter of a few inches at maximum. This means that if a thief were to attempt to steal information via NFC, they would need to stand extremely close to an NFC-enabled device, i.e. too close for comfort. This, then, translates into a rather basic, but effective, protection for NFC users.
3. Active initiation: The basic premise of NFC payments, as noted multiple times above, is to allow contactless payments over short distances. Of course, this leads to a very valid concern about payments being made without the user’s active consent, i.e. what if they never intended to make a payment but ended up doing so only because they were in the vicinity of an NFC device? Well, to deal with this particular challenge, NFC payments require customers to actively start the payment process for every single transaction they make through this method. What this means is that users must launch the NFC application on their smartphone to initiate a connection between the device and the merchant’s NFC reader. This is how it is ensured no transactions can be effected in standby mode, i.e. without users’ consent.
Security concerns are always valid, be it for any technology — after all, it helps us ensure that the tools and technologies we rely on do not end up compromising the security of our data. However, speaking specifically in the context of NFC payments — as the above discussion demonstrates, this particular means of digital payments comes loaded with ample provisions, including three unique layers of security, to ensure users can use this technology safely. Plus, their popularity among users across the globe continues to rise rapidly, which means any business that involves quickly receiving and processing payments would do well to embrace NFC payments.
Now, if you are wondering how to get started with this — we recommend you start with looking for a vendor who has experience with NFC tap and pay app development as well as other applications of NFC payments.
