A digital cash paradigm with valued and no-valued e-coins

Abstract

Digital cash is a form of money that is stored digitally. Its main advantage when compared to traditional credit or debit cards is the possibility of carrying out anonymous transactions. Diverse digital cash paradigms have been proposed during the last decades, providing different approaches to avoid the double-spending fraud, or features like divisibility or transferability. This paper presents a new digital cash paradigm that includes the so-called no-valued e-coins, which are e-coins that can be generated free of charge by customers. A vendor receiving a payment cannot distinguish whether the received e-coin is valued or not, but the customer will receive the requested digital item only in the former case. A straightforward application of bogus transactions involving no-valued e-coins is the masking of consumption patterns. This new paradigm has also proven its validity in the scope of privacy-preserving pay-by-phone parking systems, and we believe it can become a very versatile building block in the design of privacy-preserving protocols in other areas of research. This paper provides a formal description of the new paradigm, including the features required for each of its components together with a formal analysis of its security.