Challenges of Managing Secure Elements within the NFC Ecosystem

Near Field Communication (NFC) is one the most recent technologies in the area of application development and service delivery via mobile phone. NFC enables the mobile phone to act as identification and a credit card for customers. They do not need to carry their identity cards as well as their credit cards in day to day life. Instead they can use their mobile phones to pay for goods and use their phone as their identification. However, this technology has had some problems during its implementation. One of the major problems which delayed the adaption of NFC is the sensitive information which is stored in the mobile device as well as several parties that are involved in the whole process. Having several parties involved and not having a common standard affects the security of this technology where all the parties are claiming to have access to client's information (e.g. bank account details). To solve this issue, a security module that is called Secure Element (SE) is designed to be the base of the security for NFC. However, there are still some security issues with SE personalization, management, ownership and architecture that can be exploitable by attackers and delay the adaption of NFC within the society. In this paper we discuss the major proposed models for SE management and personalization and suggest other areas of technology which can be used in combination with NFC to make SE management process easier and clearer.