An Improved and Efficient Micro-payment Scheme

The rapid growth of data communications networks in recent years has led to enormous development in electronic commerce. Internet banking and trading are two important applications that execute financial transaction from anywhere in the world. This enables banks and merchants to simplify their financial transaction process as well as to provide customer friendly service 24-hours a day. On one hand the cost of manpower and infrastructure comes down drastically and on the other hand the cost of transportation, third party royalty and securing customer information is increased. Electronic micro-payment is one of the most important research topics in electronic commerce, particularly, low-cost online payment scenarios and offline payments in rural areas. In this paper, we discuss some of the important micro-payment schemes, observe their merits and limitations, and then propose an improved micro-payment scheme. We discuss two basic micro-payment schemes, which use the public/private key concept and then we review another scheme that uses the concept of hash chain. We observe certain limitations in these and related schemes, which motivate us to extend one of the attractive schemes, namely, the Hwang and Sung’ scheme [8], towards more efficient, retaining all other features intact without compromising the security strength of the scheme. We compare the improved scheme with others and show that the improved scheme provides better security and efficiency, which enables the scheme viable for real-world applications, in particular, in resource-constrained environments such as mobile payment through handheld devices or customer’s chip card for debit/credit transaction through point of sale terminal.