An efficient and secure micro-payment protocol for mobile commerce

As the mobile communications spread widely and rapidly in recent years, mobile commerce is commonly expected as part of the new epoch in the digital era. One of the substantial initiators of m-commerce was the introduction of well function and reliable payment systems. The widespread use of mobile phones has given rise to a number of schemes to allow the purchase of goods from these mobile devices. At present, mostly mobile payment systems mainly employ symmetric cryptography or certificate-based public-key cryptography to solve their related security issues. However, the limitation of computational capability in mobile devices makes the public-key cryptography framework unable to fulfill the practical requirement. In this paper, we will propose an efficient and secure micro-payment protocol suited for mobile environment. The main goals we want to achieve are as follows: (1) The broker can authenticate the customer and merchant; (2) The customer can pay safely via his mobile phone account; (3) The merchant can confirm the proof of payment from the customer; (4) The merchant can confirm the integrity of Scrip; (5) The protocol needs lower communication and computation times.