NFC provisioning example on Github

[Vince]

I want to demo the NFC provisioning example on Github.  Unfortunately this app is not complete.

https://github.com/googlesamples/android-NfcProvisioning

 

Is a complete example (ideally an APK file or Android App on the Google Play Store or the project) to perform NFC provisioning available?

Vince

[Vince]

Bjorn,

Thank you for the links/explanation.

 

We looked into this in more detail.  Is seems Nordic has shifted their position slightly over time on secure NFC pairing. The Thingy version has no features for secure pairing. It does offer a couple of cool features. On android phone, you can launch the Nordic thingy app just by NFC scan. Along with opening the app and getting an URL, you also get the mac address and a 4 byte random number.  This same random is also sent over Bluetooth advertisements.  

 

On both Android and iOS phone, you can select "connect to Thingy over NFC or Bluetooth". If you select the NFC method, you can scan the NFC tag and it will automatically initiate connection with the correct Thingy using the random code as an identifier. I think that is pretty cool. You don't need to browse through a long list of Thingy's and select the right one (which is hard, if many are advertising at the same time).

 

The original concept of secure pairing involved sending a secret key over NFC that was used for establishing a secure BLE connection. There are some applications that require secure pairing.  Do you have an App that supports secure pairing over NFC?

Vince

[Bjørn Kvaale]

The Thingy NFC tag supports Out of Band pairing (more info here). I am unsure if this is what you mean by secure pairing. In general, it is very difficult for a device to be able to read the communication between a smartphone & an NFC tag since the NFC tag only has a certain range (up to 40 mm depending on the antenna & field strength).

If this is not what you mean by secure pairing over NFC, then no, we do not have an app that supports secure pairing over nfc.