Chrg-http: A Tool for Micropayments on the World Wide Web

Chrg-http is a simple and secure protocol for electronic payments over the Internet, especially in an intranet environment. It is designed to support those micropayments (or more specific, electronic publishing, which have costs ranging from pennies to a few dollars. A widely used secure system Kerberos V5 has been incorporated into the http protocol. The security and authentication of a transactions is provided by Kerberos, without expensive public-key cryptographic computations, or on-line processing through a centralized payment processing server, which is the case to most of the existing electronic payment systems on the World Wide Web. Our implementation is based on the billing model (or the subscription model). The simplicity of the model also helps to reduce the charging cost overhead.