Truly Anonymous Transferable E-Cash: Foteini Baldimtsi, BU

  • Starts: 10:00 am on Wednesday, September 17, 2014
  • Ends: 11:00 am on Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Abstract: Cryptographic e-cash allows off-line electronic transactions between a bank, users and merchants in a secure and anonymous fashion. A plethora of e-cash constructions has been proposed in the literature; however, these traditional e-cash schemes only allow coins to be transferred once between users and merchants. Ideally, we would like users to be able to transfer coins between each other multiple times before deposit, as happens with physical cash. “Transferable” e-cash schemes are the solution to this problem. Unfortunately, the currently proposed schemes are either not efficient at all, or do not achieve the desirable anonymity properties without compromises, such as the existence of a judge, responsible for persecuting double spenders, who can trace all coins and users in the system. This paper presents the first efficient and fully anonymous transferable e-cash scheme without a judge. We start by revising the security and anonymity properties of transferable e-cash to capture issues that were previously ignored. For our construction we use the recently proposed malleable signatures by Chase et al. to allow secure and anonymous transferring of the coins. Finally, we propose an independent, efficient double spending detection mechanism and discuss possible real world applications of our construction. Joint work with: Melissa Chase, Georg Fuchsbauer, Markulf Kohlweiss
Location:
MCS 180 - Hariri Institute

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