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Calderoni et al. J Surveill Secur Saf 2020;1:106-18 I http://dx.doi.org/10.20517/jsss.2019.01 Page 117

This work could be extended according to several directions. From a theoretical point of view, a formal
validation of the experimental results presented in this article would be an interesting open issue.
Furthermore, a future research direction could involve further investigation of which countermeasures
may be set up in this chip to handle chip cloning attacks better. Following the ICAO principles designed for
electronic machine readable travel documents, a viable solution could consist of a novel protocol relying on
asymmetric cryptography. Furthermore, this tag supports notable features that enhance privacy and also
implement soft security settings, which increase tag interoperability. From a practical and application point
of view, a good option could be to design and implement stateless systems (from the user’s perspective) able
to preserve some form of security and confidentiality while enabling tag inspection. Such a system could
rely on smartphones NFC sensors and should be independent of a dedicated end-user application on the
smartphone itself. This setting should exploit the SDM feature provided by the tag.

In a conclusion, in this paper we investigated the capabilities of the NT4H2421Gx tag. To effectively check
the tag properties and some of its core functionalities, we designed a mobile application based on Android
OS which uses the NFC sensor of the smartphone as a tag reader. This application allowed us to read the
memory of the aforementioned chip at the bit level, and to discuss its core functionalities and settings in
relation to the most common security and privacy patterns. In the final part of the paper we considered
each of these aspects separately to stimulate the research community regarding these topics. Concluding,
the deep Android inspection performed on the NT4H2421Gx tag showed that it represents an option to
rely on when we need to design secure IoT applications. This tag is resistant to forging activities, and it also
preserves confidentiality and authenticity on exchanged data. Again, SDM and mirroring enable stateless
applications (from the user’s perspective) to be delivered and also allow the surpassing of several privacy
limitations.

DECLARATIONS
Authors’ contributions
Made substantial contributions to conception and design of the study and performed data analysis and
interpretation: Calderoni L
Provided technical and material support: Spadazzi L
Supervised the work: Maio D, Margara L

Availability of data and materials
Not applicable.

Financial support and sponsorship
None.

Conflicts of interest
All authors declared that there are no conflicts of interest.

Ethical approval and consent to participate
Not applicable.

Consent for publication
Not applicable.

Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020.