Android application to mimic a physical RFID card

Question

Is it possible for an Android application to send a previously stored RFID card ID to a NFC reader? The aim would be to use an Android device to enable access to a room instead

Answer 1

Well, strictly speaking. For what you want to do you don't need card emulation. You just need to send a token to the door lock that can be validated.

You could do this with Android beam by pushing an NDEF message to a device that is compatible, SNEP is the protocol you'll be looking for.

A solution I would prefer would be to get the door lock device to emulate a tag. Then you could have your Android app register a listener for that tag (Doesn't even need to be running). When the tag is detected that app will fire up and send your secure token to the lock by using the tag write NFC functions in the Android SDK.

Securing your token is another matter.

Answer 2

The android view:

Long story short: It's not possible.

Long story long:

It would be possible from a hardware and software point of view to do this. The NFC chips are perfectly capable to emulate most (not all) standard tags. The functionality to do this is even built in the lower level software but not exposed to applications.

Why: Emulating tags is what the entire mobile payment infrastructure is built upon. Allowing two card emulations of the same type at once is for most NFC chips not possible and will also shut off mobile payment as mobile payment readers only accept a single tag at once (for security reasons).

Things are a bit different for RIM based Blackberry phones, they allow card emulations (even have this feature out of the box) but they don't do any mobile payment at the moment as far as I know.