Combating Double-Spending Using Cooperative P2P Systems

An electronic cash system allows users to withdraw coins, represented as bit strings, from a bank or broker, and spend those coins anonymously at participating merchants, so that the broker cannot link spent coins to the user who withdraws them. A variety of schemes with various security properties have been proposed for this purpose, but because strings of bits are inherently copyable, they must all deal with the problem of double-spending. In this paper, we present an electronic cash scheme that introduces a new peer-to-peer system architecture to prevent double-spending without requiring an on-line trusted party or tamper-resistant software or hardware. The scheme is easy to implement, computationally efficient, and provably secure. To demonstrate this, we report on a proof-ofconcept implementation for Internet vendors along with a detailed complexity analysis and selected security proofs.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Ivan Osipkov, Eugene Y. Vasserman, Nicholas Hopper, Yongdae Kim
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Electronic Cash, Electronic Cash Scheme, ICDCS 2007, Link Spent Coins