SCsec: A Secure Near Field Communication System via Screen Camera Communication

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of short range communication services, such as contact less payment and electronic toll collection, screen camera communication and near field communication (NFC) have received considerable attention from both industry and academia. Existing short range communication technologies face challenges from deployment, compatibility, and security issues. In this work, we target the security challenges, specifically the eavesdropping attack, of screen camera communication systems. We propose SCsec, a secure screen-camera communication system. On one hand, SCsec achieves computationally secure communication between the transmitter and receiver, preventing the eavesdroppers beyond a certain range from learning anything about the content of the communication. On the other hand, SCsec achieves throughput that is comparable to existing screen camera communication schemes. We extensively evaluate the performance of our system with real world experiments on multiple devices. Numerous experiment results show that our system achieves both high security and comparable communication efficiency with existing screen camera communication systems.