NFC Offhost routing to the UICC on the Nexus 5X and the Nexus 6P

Question

I am trying to configure the NFC chipset on the Nexus 5X (bullhead) or Nexus 6P (angler) to use the UICC as NFC offhost route for AIDs I declare in my OffHostApduService.

Edit Jan 17, 2016: I've updated this question and also included the Nexus 6P as I had the chance to test it too and it behaves exactly like the 5X. So all previous findings from the 5X also seem to apply to the 6P.

I managed to do this before on a Nexus 5 (hammerhead) thanks to Michael Roland's answer on this question here and also on a Nexus 6 (shamu) (see the Nexus 6 bcm2079x config in my Github repository).

However, the Nexus 5X (and also 6P) seem to be different:

according to the ifixit teardown it contains a new chipset from NXP (PN548) and not broadcom bcm2079x like Nexus 4, 5 and 6).
I can confirm that the device can read Mifare Classic tags (which strengthens the assumption that it contains a NXP chipset, as Broadcom chipsets didn't support Mifare Classic) and a device file /dev/pn548 exists
but strange enough it contains both, a libnfc-brcm.conf and libnfc-nxp.conf config file under /system/etc/ (you can find these also in my Github repository)

As a starting point I modified the trace/log settings in both config files

set APPL_TRACE_LEVEL to 0x05 for brcm
set the NXPLOG_*_LOGLEVEL to 0x03 for nxp

What made me wonder was that I see a lot of the BrcmNfcJnimessages in logcat during bootup, similiar to the ones I've seen on Nexus 5 and 6 (which I wouldn't have expected on a device with NXP chipset):

12-11 20:45:36.840 D/BrcmNfcJni( 3434): JNI_OnLoad: enter
12-11 20:45:36.841 I/BrcmNfcJni( 3434): NFC Service: loading nci JNI
12-11 20:45:36.841 D/BrcmNfcJni( 3434): register_com_android_nfc_NativeNfcManager: enter
12-11 20:45:36.841 D/BrcmNfcJni( 3434): PowerSwitch::initialize: level=PS-UNKNOWN (0)
12-11 20:45:36.923 D/BrcmNfcJni( 3434): PowerSwitch::initialize: desired screen-off state=1
12-11 20:45:36.923 D/BrcmNfcJni( 3434): register_com_android_nfc_NativeNfcManager: exit
12-11 20:45:36.923 D/BrcmNfcJni( 3434): register_com_android_nfc_NativeNfcTag
12-11 20:45:36.924 D/BrcmNfcJni( 3434): RoutingManager::RoutingManager(): default route is 0x00
12-11 20:45:36.924 D/BrcmNfcJni( 3434): RoutingManager::RoutingManager(): mOffHostEe=0xF2
12-11 20:45:36.924 D/BrcmNfcJni( 3434): RoutingManager::registerJniFunctions
12-11 20:45:36.924 D/BrcmNfcJni( 3434): JNI_OnLoad: exit
....
....

Edit 1: I learned from the source that these "BrcmNfc.." log messages are emitted from the code in the libnfc-nci library. On previous devices the NCI (stands for: NFC controller interface) was only used by Broadcom chipsets (I guess that's the reason why the code uses the prefix "Brcm" for logging). But apparently the new NXP chipsets now also use this standardized interface (which is good), and now we also see the "Brcm..." log messages even with a NXP chipset.

Edit 3: Both phones (Nexus 5X and 6P) seem to contain the NXP PN548/C2 NFC chipset running firmware version 10.01.19 (at least in the Android 6.0.1 release).

Of course there are also outputs from the NXP pn54x halimpl:

12-11 20:45:37.407 D/        ( 3434): phNxpLog_InitializeLogLevel: global =1, Fwdnld =3, extns =3,                 hal =3, tml =3, ncir     =3,                 ncix =3
12-11 20:45:37.408 D/NxpHal  ( 3434): Entering phNxpNciHal_init_monitor
12-11 20:45:37.408 D/NxpHal  ( 3434): Returning with SUCCESS
12-11 20:45:37.408 D/NxpTml  ( 3434): Opening port=/dev/pn54x
12-11 20:45:37.408 D/NxpTml  ( 3434): phTmlNfc_i2c_reset(), VEN level 1
12-11 20:45:37.527 D/NxpTml  ( 3434): phTmlNfc_i2c_reset(), VEN level 0
12-11 20:45:37.647 D/NxpTml  ( 3434): phTmlNfc_i2c_reset(), VEN level 1
12-11 20:45:37.667 D/NxpTml  ( 3434): PN54X - Tml Reader Thread Started................
12-11 20:45:37.667 D/NxpTml  ( 3434): PN54X - Read requested.....
12-11 20:45:37.667 D/NxpTml  ( 3434): PN54X - Invoking I2C Read.....
....
....

So as a first start I tried modifiying the libnfc-nxp.conf file, starting with parameters where the comments indicated a realtion to UICC or SWP:

 # No secure element 0x00
 # eSE               0x01
 # UICC              0x02
-NXP_DEFAULT_SE=0x03
+NXP_DEFAULT_SE=0x02

and also setting the A0EC tag in NXP_CORE_CONF_EXTN to 0x01 (as the comment indicates this tag is responsible for the SWP1 connector):

# A0EC      - SWP1 interface
#             0x00 - Disabled
#             0x01 - Enabled

-        A0, EC, 01, 00,
+        A0, EC, 01, 01,

Unfortunately this didn't work and I still receive the APDUs targeted to my offhost-service in the host system (as indicated by this logcat message: E/HostEmulationManager( 3434): AID that was meant to go off-host was routed to host.).

In later tries I also tried playing around with the parameters in libnfc-brcm.conf (as described by Michael Roland in the mentioned question above), but still was not successful.

QUESTION:

Has anybody managed to configure the NFC offhost routing on the Nexus 5X or 6P going to the UICC?
Or maybe has some hints where I can look for further insights?
Also a datasheet for the PN548 chipset would be very helpful.

Edit 2: I still did not find a working solution, but I pushed my tries until now to my github repository under the dev1 branch. I also pushed the resulting logcat outputs for each test. I am testing with a new unrooted Nexus 5X on Stock Android 6.0.1. (Edit: In the meantime I also got a Nexus 6P for testing but it behaves identically.) For modifying the config files on the system partition I temporalily boot into a sideloaded recovery image: (fastboot boot twrp-2.8.7.2-bullhead.img).

At the moment I always get this error (I also tried already with 0xf2 and 0xf4 as off-host routing target):

12-16 09:38:05.524 I/BrcmNfcNfa( 3480): NFA_EeAddAidRouting(): handle:<0xf3>
12-16 09:38:05.524 I/BrcmNfcNfa( 3480): nfa_ee_find_ecb ()
12-16 09:38:05.524 E/BrcmNfcNfa( 3480): Bad ee_handle or AID (len=14)
12-16 09:38:05.524 E/BrcmNfcJni( 3480): RoutingManager::addAidRouting: failed to route AID

Martijn Coenen · Accepted Answer

As you already found out, the SWP lines aren't connected to the UICC slot. We usually don't do this for Nexus devices, since we don't support secure elements on the UICC in AOSP. The one exception to this is the Nexus 6 on Lollipop, which supported SoftCard mobile payments in the US (along with HCE). After SoftCard was acquired by Google, we removed the code to support UICCs again in Marshmallow.

I'm surprised BTW that this worked on N5 - it was supposed to not have SWP connected either. Perhaps this wasn't done correctly on all devices.

NFC Offhost routing to the UICC on the Nexus 5X and the Nexus 6P

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