LinuxCon North America/CloudOpen North America

With the Linux kernel now supporting NFC, a natural step forward seems to be enabling mobile payments, either cloud or NFC based. To do so we need to give payment applications access to secure elements, via the kernel. At the moment, both the secure element kernel interface and a generic secure element library are missing from any standard Linux distribution, effectively keeping Linux away from the mobile payments market. We will first go through a brief tour of the mobile payments ecosystem and see how it is actually implemented. Then we will describe the proposed kernel APIs for discovering, enabling and talking to secure elements. Finally we will discuss about the possible options for bringing a hardware agnostic secure element library to standard Linux distributions, and how it could be used to implement payment applications on Linux.