USENIX Conference Policies
NetCents: A Lightweight Protocol for Secure Micropayments
Tomi Poutanen, University of Toronto; Heather Hinton, Ryerson University; Michael Stumm, University of Toronto
NetCents is a lightweight, flexible and secure protocol for electronic commerce over the Internet that is designed to support purchases ranging in value from a fraction of a penny and up. NetCents differs from previous protocols in several respects: NetCents uses (vendor-independent) floating scrips as signed containers of electronic currency, passed from vendor to vendor. This allows NetCents to incorporate decentralized verification of electronic currency at a vendor's server with offline payment capture. Customer trust is not required within this protocol and a probabilistic verification scheme is used to effectively limit vendor fraud. An online arbiter is implemented that will ensure proper delivery of purchased goods and that can settle most customer/vendor disputes. NetCents can be extended to support fully anonymous payments. In this paper we describe the NetCents protocol and present experimental results of a prototype implementation.
author = {Tomi Poutanen and Heather Hinton and Michael Stumm},
title = {{NetCents}: A Lightweight Protocol for Secure Micropayments},
booktitle = {3rd USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce (EC 98)},
year = {1998},
address = {Boston, MA},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/3rd-usenix-workshop-electronic-commerce/netcents-lightweight-protocol-secure},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}