Trustee Tokens: Simple and Practical Anonymous Digital Coin Tracing

  • Authors:
  • Ari Juels

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • FC '99 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Financial Cryptography
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

We introduce a trustee-based tracing mechanism for anonymous digital cash that is simple, efficient, and provably secure relative to its underlying cryptographic primitives. In contrast to previous schemes, ours may be built on top of a real-world anonymous cash system, such as the DigiCash™ system, with minimal modification to the underlying protocols. In addition, our scheme involves no change to the structure of the coins. On the other hand, our scheme requires user interaction with a trustee, while many other such systems do not. This interaction occurs infrequently, however, and is efficient both in terms of computation and storage requirements. Our scheme also achieves more limited security guarantees in the presence of malicious trustees than many other systems do. While this is a disadvantage, it represents a tradeoff enabling us to achieve the high level of practicality of our system.