Anonymous Service Usage and Payment in Service-Based Systems

Computing services, such as web services and cloud services, for various applications have rapidly increased. One of the major concerns in using such service-based systems (SBS) is how to protect users´ private and confidential information in the systems. Anonymization of users´ identities and their transactions, which means anonymous service usage, is an effective way to provide such protection in SBS. Many approaches to anonymous service usage in various SBS have been introduced, but they have the problem that service providers cannot charge users properly or account for the service usage of users if the real identities of the users are hidden from the service providers. In this paper, an approach is presented to anonymous service usage in SBS and supporting users to pay their service usage without revealing their real identities.