Divisible E-cash made practical

Abstract

Divisible E-cash systems allow users to withdraw a unique coin of value 2n from a bank, but then to spend it in several times to distinct merchants. In such a system, whereas users want anonymity of their transactions, the bank wants to prevent, or at least detect, double-spending, and trace the defrauders. While this primitive was introduced two decades ago, quite a few (really) anonymous constructions have been introduced. In addition, all but one were just proven secure in the random oracle model, but still with either weak security models or quite complex settings and thus costly constructions. The unique proposal, secure in the standard model, appeared recently and is unpractical. As evidence, the authors left the construction of an efficient scheme secure in this model as an open problem. In this paper, we answer it with the first efficient divisible E-cash system secure in the standard model. It is based on a new way of building the coins, with a unique and public global tree structure for all the coins. Actually, we propose two constructions: a very efficient one in the random oracle model and a less efficient, but still practical, in the standard model. They both achieve constant time for withdrawing and spending coins, while allowing the bank to quickly detect double-spendings by a simple comparison of the serial numbers of deposited coins to the ones of previously spent coins.