Anonymous Split E-Cash—Toward Mobile Anonymous Payments

Abstract

Anonymous E-Cash was first introduced in 1982 as a digital, privacy-preserving alternative to physical cash. A lot of research has since then been devoted to extend and improve its properties, leading to the appearance of multiple schemes. Despite this progress, the practical feasibility of E-Cash systems is still today an open question. Payment tokens are typically portable hardware devices in smart card form, resource constrained due to their size, and therefore not suited to support largely complex protocols such as E-Cash. Migrating to more powerful mobile platforms, for instance, smartphones, seems a natural alternative. However, this implies moving computations from trusted and dedicated execution environments to generic multiapplication platforms, which may result in security vulnerabilities. In this work, we propose a new anonymous E-Cash system to overcome this limitation. Motivated by existing payment schemes based on MTM (Mobile Trusted Module) architectures, we consider at design time a model in which user payment tokens are composed of two modules: an untrusted but powerful execution platform (e.g., smartphone) and a trusted but constrained platform (e.g., secure element). We show how the protocol’s computational complexity can be relaxed by a secure split of computations: nonsensitive operations are delegated to the powerful platform, while sensitive computations are kept in a secure environment. We provide a full construction of our proposed Anonymous Split E-Cash scheme and show that it fully complies with the main properties of an ideal E-Cash system. Finally, we test its performance by implementing it on an Android smartphone equipped with a Java-Card-compatible secure element.