Privacy enhancement for fair PayWord-based micropayment

A micropayment scheme provides a secure and efficient solution for electronic payment environments that require frequent transactions with nominal fees. It is particularly suitable for mobile applications in which a customer is charged for either time spent or data volume transferred. Most proposed micropayment schemes are based on "PayWord" by Rivest and Shamir. The security and efficiency of a micropayment scheme can be ensured by adopting the hash chain technique. Recent research on micropayment has introduced additional properties such as user anonymity and fairness. However, the existing schemes may lose efficiency and some of the original desirable properties of PayWord while achieving new ones. We propose an anonymous fair offline micropayment scheme that satisfies user anonymity and fairness and retains the efficiency and properties of PayWord, such as offline broker. A user can make multiple purchases from different vendors without interacting with the broker again. PayWord's postpaid mechanism is adopted in order to make our scheme more attractive to users. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first micropayment scheme to simultaneously offer the aforementioned properties. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

[1]  Jacques Stern,et al.  Security Arguments for Digital Signatures and Blind Signatures , 2015, Journal of Cryptology.

[2]  Jian-xin Liao,et al.  Discrete micropayment protocol based on master-slave payword chain , 2007 .

[3]  Yi Mu,et al.  Efficient Generic On-Line/Off-Line Signatures Without Key Exposure , 2007, ACNS.

[4]  Wonjun Lee,et al.  A pay word-based micropayment protocol supporting multiple payments , 2003, Proceedings. 12th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (IEEE Cat. No.03EX712).

[5]  Yuguang Fang,et al.  A secure mobile electronic payment architecture platform for wireless mobile networks , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

[6]  Basel Alomair,et al.  Efficient Authentication for Mobile and Pervasive Computing , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

[7]  Xin Zhao,et al.  A Novel Micropayment Scheme with Complete Anonymity , 2009, 2009 Fifth International Conference on Information Assurance and Security.

[8]  Adi Shamir,et al.  PayWord and MicroMint: Two Simple Micropayment Schemes , 1996, Security Protocols Workshop.

[9]  Sung-Ming Yen.  PayFair: a prepaid internet micropayment scheme ensuring customer fairness , 2001 .

[10]  Levente Buttyán,et al.  Removing the financial incentive to cheat in micropayment schemes , 2000 .

[11]  Yang Zongkai,et al.  A new fair micropayment system based on hash chain , 2004, IEEE International Conference on e-Technology, e-Commerce and e-Service, 2004. EEE '04. 2004.

[12]  Mehdi Shajari,et al.  MVPayword: Secure and efficient Payword-based micropayment scheme , 2009, 2009 Second International Conference on the Applications of Digital Information and Web Technologies.

[13]  Jie Wu,et al.  Survey on anonymous communications in computer networks , 2010, Comput. Commun..

[14]  M. Scott.  Implementing cryptographic pairings , 2007 .

[15]  N. Asokan,et al.  Optimistic fair exchange of digital signatures , 1998, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.