Almost. The biggest hurdle in SE is "provisioning", i.e. how do you get your master keys in there. This is why Google needed to rely on the carriers for authent

Almost. The biggest hurdle in SE is "provisioning", i.e. how do you get your master keys in there. This is why Google needed to rely on the carriers for authentication. They already have a full infrastructure for that in place. The NFC chip in Nexus for example (PN5323 IIRC) interfaces with an external secure element[1], which would be in the SIM card in their case and in the new use cases it would be the external uSD card. The NFC chip passes data transparently between the external NFC device and the SE like a bridge.[2] I believe in Apple's case they just built an SE directly into their chip and came up with their own provisioning infrastructure, bypassing the carrier. Which I think is the better way. That is what Google should have done. [1] http://www.adafruit.com/datasheets/pn532ds.pdf http://www.adafruit.com/datasheets/pn532ds.pdf (page 20) [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFC-WI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFC-WI