An innovative electronic group-buying system for mobile commerce

With the benefits of discount and convenience, the group-buying mechanism has become a popular commerce service. Nevertheless, there exist several drawbacks in current group-buying systems. First, the absence of security consideration may reveal the privacy of involved participants. Moreover, buyers must pay money to the initiator in advance. Without a trusted third party to monitor the purchase, the initiator may vanish after collecting the money. To mitigate the risk of the above weaknesses, we propose a new mechanism introducing a group-buying server to secure and monitor the transaction. Because the server acts as a mediator, it can help the buyer and vender to negotiate with each other through a secure channel. Mutual authentication between the buyer and vender is guaranteed under the BAN logic model. In particular, we employ the Bloom filter and XOR operation to reduce the size of the transaction table and the computational cost. Thus, the new method can be implemented in mobile devices.

► A lightweight group-buying mechanism is proposed for mobile commerce.
► A bloom filter is applied to reduce the size of verified table.
► The BAN logic model is used to prove the correctness of mutual authentication.
► The simulation is conducted to show the performance.