Digital-Ticket-Controlled Digital Ticket Circulation

This paper presents a new digital-ticket circulating scheme and trust management scheme for a digital ticket. A digital ticket is a digital medium that guarantees certain rights of the owner and it includes software licenses, resource access tickets, event tickets, and plane tickets. The circulation of digital tickets comprises three types of principal transactions: issuance, transfer, and redemption. Depending on the application, various conditions must be satisfied to execute these transactions, e.g., only qualified shops can issue the tickets and only a certain agent can transfer the tickets. This paper introduces circulation control tickets, which are required to issue, transfer, redeem a ticket, and proposes specifying the required control ticket types in the ticket to be circulated itself using the Generalized Ticket Definition Language. The ticket circulating system issues, transfers, or redeems a ticket only if the control tickets are owned by the participants of the transaction. The circulation control tickets themselves can be any type of digital ticket, e.g., a driver's license or a membership certificate to certain group, and these tickets can be recursively circulated in the ticket circulating system. This scheme provides the ticket circulating system with both the flexibility needed to match the business scheme of interest and application independence. This paper also proposes a ticket-type-based trust management scheme that enables users to mechanically verify the trust of a ticket by the presented ticket type verification procedure.