How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Blog

I’ve been playing with NFC on the Google Nexus S 4G for Sprint, and ran into an interesting bug. I encoded a malformed content provider uri string onto a tag and discovered I could repeatedly crash the NFC chip.

The string I encoded (using NXP TagWriter) was simply content://contacts. I haven’t done any digging why this particular format was a problem, but the Kaspersky Lab writes that this is a DoS vulnerability on NFC applications. Google Wallet comes to mind as a potential target for malicious actors, though I’m not sure what good it would do to perform DoS on an NFC transaction besides annoy people.

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