An anonymous electronic commerce scheme with an off-line authority and untrusted agents
Josep Domingo‐Ferrer, Jordi Herrera‐Joancomartí · ACM SIGMOD Record · 1998
In the last years, the exponential growth of computer networks has created an incredibly large offer of products and services in the net. Such a huge amount of information makes it impossible for a single person to analyze all existing offers of a product on the net and decide which of them fits better her requirements. This problem is solved with the intelligent trade agents (ITA), which are programs that have the ability to roam a network, collect business-related data and use them to make decisions to buy goods on their owners' behalf. Known ITA systems do not provide anonymity in transactions, require an on-line trusted third party and implicitly assume that the user trusts the ITA. We present a new scheme for an intelligent untrusted trade agent system allowing anonymous electronic transactions with an off-line trusted third party.