Evaluation of Contactless Smartcard Antennas
This addresses security and privacy concerns for smartcard users by enabling control over contactless functionality, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing disassembly and design analysis methods.
The researchers tackled the problem of evaluating contactless smartcard antennas by disassembling cards to obtain components and examining antenna designs, resulting in concepts to disable or make the contactless interface user-switchable.
This report summarizes the results of our evaluation of antennas of contactless and dual interface smartcards and our ideas for user-switchable NFC antennas. We show how to disassemble smartcards with contactless capabilities in order to obtain the bare chip module and the bare antenna wire. We examine the design of various smartcard antennas and present concepts to render the contactless interface unusable. Finally, we present ideas and practical experiments to make the contactless interface switchable by the end-user.