Provably secure metering scheme

Abstract

Naor and Pinkas introduced metering schemes at Eurocrypt’98 in order to decide on advertisement fees for web servers. In the schemes, any server should be able to construct a proof to be sent to an audit agency if and only if it has been visited by at least a certain number, say k, of clients. This paper first shows an attack for their schemes such that only two malicious clients can prevent a server from computing a correct proof. We next present provably secure metering schemes. Finally, an efficient robust secret sharing scheme is derived from our metering scheme.