Secure Electronic Cash Scheme with Anonymity Revocation

Abstract EN

In a popular electronic cash scheme, there are three participants: the bank, the customer, and the merchant.

First, a customer opens an account in a bank.

Then, he withdraws an e-cash from his account and pays it to a merchant.

After checking the electronic cash’s validity, the merchant accepts it and deposits it to the bank.

There are a number of requirements for an electronic cash scheme, such as, anonymity, unforgeability, unreusability, divisibility, transferability, and portability.

Anonymity property of electronic cash schemes can ensure the privacy of payers.

However, this anonymity property is easily abused by criminals.

In 2011, Chen et al.

proposed a novel electronic cash system with trustee-based anonymity revocation from pairing.

On demand, the trustee can disclose the identity for e-cash.

But, in this paper we point out that Chen et al.’s scheme is subjected to some drawbacks.

To contribute secure electronic cash schemes, we propose a new offline electronic cash scheme with anonymity revocation.

We also provide the formally security proofs of the unlinkability and unforgeability.

Furthermore, the proposed scheme ensures the property of avoiding merchant frauds.