Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail

We present a computational technique for combatting junk mail in particular and controlling access to a shared resource in general. The main idea is to require a user to compute a moderately hard, but not intractable, function in order to gain access to the resource, thus preventing frivolous use. To this end we suggest several pricing Junctions, based on, respectively, extracting square roots modulo a prime, the Fiat-Shamir signature scheme, and the Ong-Schnorr-Shamir (cracked) signature scheme.

[1]  Robert B. Ash,et al.  Information Theory , 2020, The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.

[2]  Whitfield Diffie,et al.  New Directions in Cryptography , 1976, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[3]  Adi Shamir,et al.  A T=O(2n/2), S=O(2n/4) Algorithm for Certain NP-Complete Problems , 1981, SIAM J. Comput..

[4]  Adi Shamir,et al.  Efficient Signature Schemes Based on Polynomial Equations , 1984, CRYPTO.

[5]  Adi Shamir,et al.  An efficient signature scheme based on quadratic equations , 1984, STOC '84.

[6]  Don Coppersmith,et al.  Another Birthday Attack , 1986, CRYPTO.

[7]  David Chaum,et al.  Advances in Cryptology: Proceedings Of Crypto 83 , 2012 .

[8]  N. Koblitz.  A Course in Number Theory and Cryptography , 1987 .

[9]  E. Brickell,et al.  Cryptanalysis: a survey of recent results , 1988, Proc. IEEE.

[10]  Moni Naor,et al.  Efficient cryptographic schemes provably as secure as subset sum , 1989, 30th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science.

[11]  Ralph C. Merkle,et al.  One Way Hash Functions and DES , 1989, CRYPTO.

[12]  Kevin S. Mccurley,et al.  Odds and ends from cryptology and computational number theory , 1990 .

[13]  Ronald L. Rivest,et al.  Introduction to Algorithms , 1990 .

[14]  Eli Biham,et al.  Differential Cryptanalysis of Snefru, Khafre, REDOC-II, LOKI and Lucifer , 1991, CRYPTO.

[15]  Antoon Bosselaers,et al.  An Attack on the Last Two Rounds of MD4 , 1991, CRYPTO.

[16]  Ronald L. Rivest,et al.  The MD4 Message-Digest Algorithm , 1990, RFC.

[17]  Ronald L. Rivest,et al.  The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm , 1992, RFC.

[18]  Thomas A. Berson,et al.  Differential Cryptanalysis Mod 2^32 with Applications to MD5 , 1992, EUROCRYPT.

[19]  Antoon Bosselaers,et al.  Collisions for the Compressin Function of MD5 , 1994, EUROCRYPT.

[20]  Antoon Bosselaers,et al.  Collisions for the Compressin Function of MD5 , 1994, EUROCRYPT.

[21]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  Pricing in computer networks: motivation, formulation, and example , 1993, TNET.

[22]  Kimberly C. Claffy,et al.  Mitigating the Coming Internet Crunch: Multiple Service Levels via Precedence , 1994, J. High Speed Networks.