NetCents: a lightweight protocol for secure micropayments

  • Authors:
  • Tomi Poutanen;Heather Hinton;Michael Stumm

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Toronto;Ryerson University;University of Toronto

  • Venue:
  • WOEC'98 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce - Volume 3
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

NetCents is a lightweight, flexible and secure protocol for electronic commerce over the Internet that is designed to support purchases ranging in value from a fraction of a penny and up. NetCents differs from previous protocols in several respects: NetCents uses (vendor-independent) floating scrips as signed containers of electronic currency, passed from vendor to vendor. This allows NetCents to incorporate decentralized verification of electronic currency at a vendor's server with offline payment capture. Customer trust is not required within this protocol and a probabilistic verification scheme is used to effectively limit vendor fraud. An online arbiter is implemented that will ensure proper delivery of purchased goods and that can settle most customer/vendor disputes. NetCents can be extended to support fully anonymous payments. In this paper we describe the NetCents protocol and present experimental results of a prototype implementation.