Combating Double-Spending Using Cooperative P2P Systems

• Published in: 27th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS '07) p. 41
• Main Authors: Osipkov, I., Vasserman, E.Y., Hopper, N., Yongdae Kim
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-06-2007
• Subjects: Application software; Computer architecture; Computer science; Consumer electronics; Costs; Credit cards; Hardware; Internet; Peer to peer computing; Security
• ISSN: 1063-6927; 2575-8411
• DOI: 10.1109/ICDCS.2007.91

An electronic cash system allows users to withdraw coins, represented as bit strings, from a bank or broker, and spend those coins anonymously at participating merchants, so that the broker cannot link spent coins to the user who withdraws them. A variety of schemes with various security properties have been proposed for this purpose, but because strings of bits are inherently copyable, they must all deal with the problem of double-spending. In this paper, we present an electronic cash scheme that introduces a new peer-to-peer system architecture to prevent double-spending without requiring an on-line trusted party or tamper-resistant software or hardware. The scheme is easy to implement, computationally efficient, and provably secure. To demonstrate this, we report on a proof-of-concept implementation for Internet vendors along with a detailed complexity analysis and selected security proofs.