Mini-Cash: A Minimalistic Approach to E-Commerce

  • Authors:
  • Markus Jakobsson

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • PKC '99 Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

By introducing a new e-commerce paradigm - that of disposable anonymous accounts - we are able to reduce storage requirements, while protecting against strong attacks on the system, and keeping computational requirements low. Our proposed scheme reduces storage costs of payers and merchants to the lowest theoretically possible, offers users computational (but not revocable) privacy, and protects against the bank robbery attack. Furthermore, by being practically implementable as a smart card payment scheme, it avoids the threats of viral attacks on users. The scheme allows the notion of "pre-paid" cards by not requiring a link to the identity of the card owner.