I've worked in the payment industry and among other things built a payment terminal, so I know a thing or two about it.
1st: The message overhead during communication is not an issue. It is tiny compared to the time it takes for the credit card to do it's crypto thing.
2nd: This won't be adapted ever. There is simply way to much working infrastructure out there build on the APDU protocol. And there are so many companies and stakeholders involved that doing any change will take years. If they start aligning on a change, it would be something that makes a difference, not something that safes time in the order of 5 to 20 milliseconds. per payment.
Hi there, author here! I think you've highlighted a couple of things worth clarifying in the doc:
1. Apple having just announced it is opening up NFC to developers means that both major mobile platforms can now act as responding devices; so widely distributing new NFC protocols to consumer devices has become very fast and inexpensive through an update to the OS or installing a third party app.
2. Mobile consumer hardware is sufficiently fast for the application operations (eg. Cryptographic operations) so that these roundtrip and metadata overheads of APDU do actually make a meaningful contribution to the total time it takes to complete a transaction. Experiencing this in my development efforts here was the motivation for designing this alternative.
3. A1 is interoperable with APDU infrastructure and can therefore be adopted by terminals immediately, since reader terminals can attempt an A1 initiation and any APDU response from a legacy device is considered a failure; at which point the terminal can fall back to its default APDU message exchange.
I will update the doc to clarify these points, what do you think?
Given your experience I'd be interested in your detailed feedback, maybe we could jump on a call soon if you have time?
> 1. Apple having just announced it is opening up NFC
> to developers means that both major mobile
> platforms can now act as responding devices;
> 2. Mobile consumer hardware is sufficiently fast for the application
> operations (eg. Cryptographic operations)
You are right here. It is possible to emulate a card using mobile phones. We've been able to shim/emulate any card for much longer.
The thing is: To connect to the payment system you need a certificate. And you simply don't get it unless you can prove that you have all kinds of security measures applied.
For android and apple, the actual payment stuff runs inside a isolated little micro-controller which has been certified and is temper proof/protected. This little thing is fortified so far that it will destruct itself when you try to open it up. There are alarm meshes, light sensors and much more inside the chip to detect any intrusion just to protect the certificate.
If you don't have that security, the payment providers will deny you their certificate, plain and simple.
You can build your own thing using card emulation via apps, but you will take all the risks.
How it works in practice is the following: These temper proof micro-controllers can run java-card code. You can write an applet for them, get it installed (if you have the key from apple/google - not easy). Then install it and you have a two-way communication: Your applet inside the secure world communicating with the payment world, and your ordinary mobile app showing things on the screen.
"You can build your own thing using card emulation via apps, but you will take all the risks." right! This is exactly what I've developed. I've built a new NFC application, with its own PKI infrastructure, that's deployed onto users' mobile devices via an app install. It works over APDU, but it would be more efficient if A1 was made available by the two major mobile OS. It would likely shave off >10% of the total time to complete which makes a material difference to the failure rate (ie. customer's lifting away too early or other interference) and therefore improves the overall UX.
1st: The message overhead during communication is not an issue. It is tiny compared to the time it takes for the credit card to do it's crypto thing.
2nd: This won't be adapted ever. There is simply way to much working infrastructure out there build on the APDU protocol. And there are so many companies and stakeholders involved that doing any change will take years. If they start aligning on a change, it would be something that makes a difference, not something that safes time in the order of 5 to 20 milliseconds. per payment.
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