Although near field communication(NFC) has been said to be the next big thing for many years, its adoption is only happening in small and incremental steps. The main problem is that people would have to purchase an NFC-enabled phone, usually found in newer and more expensive smartphones. Acting as an alternative solution to NFC, innovative purely acoustic-based software has attracted the eyeballs of tech savvies recently.
Although near field communication(NFC) has been said to be the next big thing for many years, its adoption is only happening in small and incremental steps. The main problem is that people would have to purchase an NFC-enabled phone, usually found in newer and more expensive smartphones. Acting as an alternative solution to NFC, innovative purely acoustic-based software has attracted the eyeballs of tech savvies recently.
MICROSOFT'S SOLUTION
The Microsoft India team announced in August their latest creation – Dhwani (“sound”in English), a novel, acoustic-based NFC system that uses the microphone and speakers on any smartphones to enable bidirectional communication between devices. Similar to NFC, Dhwani is created for short-range, peer-to?peer communication such as data transfers and payments. Different from NFC, it requires no hardware, and it transmits messages by sound and the receiver reads the sound wave and decodes messages. To secure the transaction, the team developed a self-jamming technique called JamSecure, “wherein the receiver intentionally jams the signal it is trying to receive, thereby stymieing eavesdroppers, but then uses self-interference cancellation to successfully decode the incoming message,” according to Dhwani: Secure Peer-to-Peer Acoustic NFC , a paper released by Microsoft India. In other words, the message is cloaked so the eavesdroppers can only capture unprocessed messages and the jamming sound. This is not to be mistaken by the crypto?graphic security; the paper stated that Dhwani requires no shared passcodes or certificates to be set up beforehand. Note that the data transfer rate of Dhwani is at 2.4 Kbps. With the very limited transfer rate, it may be able to do simple data sharing such as transferring coded account and payment information, while sharing any images or videos exceeding 1MB remains unlikely. The team also claims that, at frequencies of 6KHz, Dhwani can operate fine in public spaces such as malls and cafes, where the ambient noise could automatically be filtered through by the system.
BRAZILIAN SOLUTION
Kinetcs, a company based in Brazil, launched NearByte, a device that also harnesses the acoustic technique used for mobile communication. NearByte's encryption technique is slightly different from Dhwani yet the concept is the same. Instead of the receiver jamming the incoming messages, the sender encrypts the data and sends it to the receiver as a series of buzzing noise. Although the transfer rate is somewhat higher than Dhwani, at 100 Kbps, it is still intended only for small data transfers. So far, the device has been deployed by several Brazilian and international organizations as a platform for exchanging contact information between devices. The company intends to expand its use to make mobile payment even easier for consumers at instances such as purchasing at a vending machine, paying for parking, buying a movie ticket, and many more.
Smartphone-related technologies are gradually replacing the various tools around people with powerful features that never before existed. New technologies are likely to go into practice for many more applications in the foreseeable future. As the competition in mobile payment grows, we see major IT companies, like Microsoft, try to introduce a safer and more convenient way of communication to influence the market. In the mean time, biometric technology has gone commercailized and is used by some big names, like Apple, to secure information and mobile payment. More companies joining the competition can be expected.