Passive Entities: A Strategy for Electronic Payment Design

The participating entities in an electronic payment usually include an overseeing bank as well as a customer and a merchant. Many electronic payment schemes are designed so that the bank is off-line during the actual payment between the customer and the merchant. This paper introduces the concept of passive entities which allows the protocol designer to allocate the level of processing required by an entity during a particular phase of the payment scheme. To illustrate the use of passive entities, a new electronic payment scheme is developed which has the customer assigned as the passive entity during payment. This new protocol is more efficient than similar protocols. A variation of this protocol is also described in which the identity of the customer is kept anonymous from the merchant.

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