Attacker then emulates the card and makes withdrawals or payments from victim’s account.
The fact you can trick the NFC system on the phone into reacting to “phantom” payment events and intercept the resulting token sounds like a pretty big problem.
That’s not what’s happening though? It’s relaying a physical card’s nfc not tricking mobile contactless payments
That’s what I mean, it shouldn’t be possible to relay anything. It should only trigger when there’s a reader physically in proximity to the phone.
Please keep in mind this is happening on the victim’s phone which is not rooted, the malware is a regular non-system app.
If it were happening on a rooted phone I could understand being able to subvert the NFC chain because at some point it has to pass from hardware to software and if you’re privileged enough you can cut in there. But the malware app is not privileged.
There is nothing being subverted, nfc has applications other than contactless payments that require it acting as the reader, which is why it’s supported. It would be better if it was behind an explicit permission (just like other sensors would) but limiting it to only responding to readers is like limiting Bluetooth to audio transmission.
This isn’t about subscribing to NFC events, the malware is creating fake NFC events without the NFC sensor being involved in a physical interaction with a tag or reader.
android permissions arent meant to be bypassable either but i bet theres malware that does it. its kinda what it does.
When it happens it’s a security flaw and it needs to get patched. It’s not normal everyday thing.
