Security countermeasures

The NFC Wallet SDK includes countermeasures for common mobile threats.

Coverage by flow

Provisioning

Provisioning includes wallet enrollment and Tokenization.

During provisioning, the NFC Wallet SDK protects against:

• Debugger attached

• Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack

• Jailbroken device

• Non-designated application signing certificate

• Hooking detection

• Debug build used in Production Environment

• Binary tampering detection

Payment

During payment, the NFC Wallet SDK protects against:

• Debugger attached

• Hooking detection

• Debug build used in Production Environment

• Binary tampering detection

Countermeasures

The countermeasures below apply to each security threat.

Debugger attached

• Threat: An attacker attempts to reverse engineer the digital wallet application by attaching a debugger at runtime.

• Applies to: Provisioning, Payment

• Build type: Release

• SDK behavior: Returns an error during SDK initialization, provisioning, and payment when a debugger is attached.

Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack

• Threat: An attacker attempts to intercept network traffic between the digital wallet application and the Cloud Provisioning Service (CPS).

• Applies to: Provisioning

• Build type: Release

• SDK behavior: Returns an error when TLS server certificate validation fails.

Jailbroken device

• Threat: A jailbroken device runs the digital wallet application.

• Applies to: Provisioning

• Build type: Debug, Release

• SDK behavior: Returns an error on jailbroken devices during provisioning.

Non-designated application signing certificate

• Threat: The digital wallet application is not signed with the designated certificate.

• Applies to: Provisioning

• Build type: Debug, Release

• SDK behavior: Returns an error and fails wallet secure enrollment.

• Setup: Configure the signing certificate hash during onboarding. See Provide onboarding data.

Hooking detection

• Threat: An attacker attempts to hook method calls to monitor or modify runtime behavior.

• Applies to: Provisioning, Payment

• Build type: Debug, Release

• SDK behavior: Returns an error when hooking is detected.

Debug build used in Production Environment

• Threat: The App Store application integrates the Debug build of the NFC Wallet SDK.

• Applies to: Provisioning, Payment

• Build type: Debug

• SDK behavior: Returns an error when the SDK detects a production-signed application using the Debug build.

Binary tampering detection

• Threat: An attacker attempts to modify the digital wallet application or SDK binary.

• Applies to: Provisioning, Payment

• Build type: Debug, Release

• SDK behavior: Returns an error when tampering is detected.