Recent advances in electronic cash design

Abstract

Electronic cash (or e-cash) is an electronic payment solution that is usually viewed as an attempt to emulate electronically the main characteristics of regular cash. In particular, e-cash and other payment solutions should protect the privacy of users during a purchase. The main distinction of e-cash with respect to other electronic payment systems is that electronic coins are stored on a device controlled by the user, e.g. a smart card or a personal computer hard disk. Since the introduction by Chaum [10,11] of unconditionally untraceable electronic money, e-cash systems have been extensively studied. Recent work has mainly focused on the efficiency of the protocols with respect to several notions of anonymity. In this talk, we will review the main recent results and also discuss the possibility to transfer a coin without involving the bank which is considered as an important characteristic of regular cash. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2008.