Offline payments with auditable tracing

  • Authors:
  • Dennis Kügler;Holger Vogt

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Darmstadt University of Technology, Darmstadt, Germany;Department of Computer Science, Darmstadt University of Technology, Darmstadt, Germany

  • Venue:
  • FC'02 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Financial cryptography
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Tracing is an important mechanism to prevent crimes in anonymous payment systems. However, it is also a threat to the customer's privacy as long as its application cannot be controlled. Relying solely on trusted third parties for tracing is inadequate, as there are no strong guarantees that deanonymizations are only applied legally. A recent tracing concept is auditable tracing, where the customer has the power to control the deanonymization. With auditable tracing no trust is required, while it offers comparable tracing mechanisms. We present the first off-line payment system with auditable tracing. Our payment system supports coin and owner tracing as well as self deanonymization in the case of blackmailing.