A practical anonymous off-line multi-authority payment scheme

Electronic payment is one of the critical success factors for an enterprise to provide attractive services on the Internet in order to keep customers and attract new ones for electronic commerce. The major drawbacks of on-line payment schemes are the difficulty of the management of a large database incurred in preserving the anonymity of customers, and the transaction failure caused by the disconnecting of the shop and the bank when a customer has some shopping. Also, in a single money issuer payment scheme, if the money issuer is not trustworthy, he can issue extra e-coins as he wishes, which may cause great injury or danger to the society or the bank. In this paper, we propose a practical anonymous off-line multi-authority payment scheme (AOMPS). By means of AOMPS, the size of a bank's database is dramatically reduced and distributed to shops. Also, the issue of e-coins is controlled by several issuers, who can be chosen by the customer, on the current available issuers list according to the Internet conditions.