An Efficient and Secure Credit Card-based Billing Scheme for Telephone Services

MasterCard and VisaCard use credit cards to support a number of services, such as Masterphone or Visaphone, which allow cardholders to make phone calls from any telephone. However, these services take little or no security precautions. Although SET protocol has defined a secure payment method for card transactions over open networks, it cannot fit in telephone systems. In this paper, we propose a credit card-based payment scheme for public switched telephone systems. The proposed scheme can securely authenticate callers without exposing their secret information on the telecommunication networks. And the scheme also supports anonymity of callers, that is, the telephone company does not know who make these phone calls and the credit card company does not know who are callees.