An efficient fair payment system

Many proposed payment systems allow the payer to remain anonymous during a transaction. However, this unconditional privacy protection could be misused by criminals, e.g. for blackmailing or money laundering. With a fair payment system, anonymous payments are still possible, but the anonymity can be removed with the help of a trusted party which need not be involved in the transaction itself. In this paper, we present an efficient fair payment system and we discuss its security.