A Study of Micro-payment Based on One-way Hash Chain

Electronic payment systems have gradually become an important issue nowadays because of the popularity and importance of electronic commerce on the Internet. Security and convenience related topics are the most important issues that concern people. The electronic micropayment is one of the most popular research topics on electronic commerce. Recently, many efficient micropayment schemes, based on the usage of one-way hash chain, were developed. They enable more and more new applications for e-commerce. However, all existing micropayment schemes suffer a common drawback that a generated chain of electronic coins can only be spent at a specific merchant. This drawback limits the widespread application of existing micro-payment schemes. In this thesis, we introduce several micro-payment schemes based on one-way hash chain and review some literatures on supporting multiple payment. We propose a new micropayment scheme which achieve the following three goals: micro-payment multiple transactions, service providers, and anonymity.