Reusable Off-line Electronic Cash Using Secret Splitting
Hitesh Tewari, Donal O’Mahony, Michael Peirce · 1998
The idea of electronic cash, as a payment instrument is appealing, but has yet to be widely deployed commercially. We outline the properties of two major approaches to the provision of electronic cash, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. We then propose a new scheme based on secret splitting that allows for off-line spending of coins with a tailored level of anonymity and allowing reuse of the same coin many times. We then discuss a number of practical issues such as the trade off between coin size and the ability to detect double spending. Introduction The rapid growth of data communications networks in recent years has led to a massive growth in electronic commerce. Large organizations such as banks are always looking for means for speeding up and simplifying the financial transaction process. The cost associated with printing, transporting and securing cash is quite high. This has led to a great deal of research on the concept of a cashless society, which would resu...