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Fair electronic cash based on double signatures

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Abstract

In order to decrease crimes such as money laundering, blackmailing etc. in electronic cash systems, fair electronic cash has been a major focus of academic research in electronic commence. When a bank finds some dubious cash or owner, the trusted entity or trustee can help him to revoke the anonymity of the cash. In the previous protocols, the trustee knows all the information of the cash whether he is trusted or not, that is, he can trace the user or cash unconditionally. Furthermore, the dishonest trustee may deceive a user, which means that he may withdraw cash while tracing other users. Such cases are unfair to the honest users.

A new fair electronic cash protocol based on untrustworthy trustees is proposed in this paper. The key idea is that the coin structure should include the signatures of both the trustee and the bank so that the trustee shares the information of the cash with the bank, while we do not use the secret sharing scheme. In contrast with the previous protocols, neither the trustee nor the bank can trace the money without the help of the other entity. In this way, the privacy of the user is protected furthest. Also, the trustee is off-line in the protocol, which means that he will not be involved in withdrawing the cash. Therefore, the protocol is efficient for implementation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Key Lab of ISN, Xidian University, 710071, Xi’an, P. R. China

    Chen Xiaofeng, Wang Changjie & Wang Yumin

Authors
  1. Chen Xiaofeng
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  2. Wang Changjie
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  3. Wang Yumin
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Additional information

This paper is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 60073052 and 19931010).

CHEN Xiaofeng was born in 1976. He received the B.S. degree in mathematics from Northwest University in 1998 and the M.S. degree in mathematics from Northwest University in 2000. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in cryptography at Xidian University. His research interests are electronic commerce and elliptic curve cryptography.

WANG Changjie was born in 1974. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from the School of Communication Engineering, Xidian University in 1996 and 1999. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in cryptography at Xidian University. His research interests are electronic commerce and network security.

WANG Yumin was born in 1936. He is now a professor and Ph.D. advisor in Xidian University, and a member of IEEE. His research interests are communication, information theory, coding and cryptography.

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Chen, X., Wang, C. & Wang, Y. Fair electronic cash based on double signatures. J. Compt. Sci. & Technol. 17, 830–835 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02960773

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02960773

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