Interoperable and untraceable debit-tokens for electronic fee collection

Abstract

In this paper we propose a pre-paid payment scheme suitable for Electronic Fee Collection in road pricing applications. The payment instrument used is implemented as a pair secret key/public key of an identity-based version of the Guillou-Quisquater identification/signature scheme. This design choice allows for interoperability among issuers of payment instruments and road services providers in the system, while the payment transaction can be carried out in a short time. This is the main contribution of our paper. A payment instrument is untraceable in the sense that it cannot be linked to a user. The untraceability feature can be revoked under the decision of a court. The privacy mechanism is based on the concept of revocable pseudonyms, the withdrawal stage of which is realized with an original protocol. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2000.