An efficient and practical scheme for privacy protection in the E-commerce of digital goods

Abstract

It is commonly acknowledged that customers' privacy in electronic commerce should be well protected. The solutions may come not only from the ethics education and legislation, but also from cryptographic technologies. In this paper we propose and analyze a privacy protection scheme for e-commerce of digital goods. The scheme takes cryptography as its technical means to realize privacy protection for online customers. It is efficient in both computational cost and communication cost. It is very practical for real e-commerce systems compared with previous solutions. The cryptographic technique presented in this paper is rather simple. But the scheme has great application potential in reality. We give careful security analysis to the scheme.