Abstract
Near field communication (NFC) is a wireless communication technology. It is one of the most recent technologies that offers great and varied promise in the area of application development and service delivery via mobile phone, such as payment, ticketing, voting, access control function, navigation, and many others. NFC technology enables the mobile equipment to act as identification and a virtual credit card for customers, but one of the most challenging problems introduced by NFC mobile payment protocol is security. Therefore, a secure and efficient authentication mechanism is particularly crucial for NFC mobile payment systems. The operations cost of authentication sessions is considered as a strict indicator to evaluate the authentication protocols side by side with the security requirement achievements in NFC technology. The secure authentication protocol for NFC mobile payment systems (SAP-NFC) is one of the recent authentication protocols that have been proposed to achieve high levels of security, which includes fully mutual authentication, anonymity, and untraceability. Moreover, the SAP-NFC protocol can prevent current security attacks. In this paper, we analyze the performance of the SAP-NFC protocol compared with other recent NFC mobile payment protocols in all system entities. The performance analysis finds that the SAP-NFC protocol not only supports strong security features, but also offers a low cost in terms of the amount of computations. Therefore, the performance analysis proves that SAP-NFC protocol is secure and reasonable for practical implementation.