An Anonymous Account-Based Mobile Payment Protocol for a Restricted Connectivity Scenario

Recent advances in m-commerce have raised the usage of scenarios with communication restrictions. These scenarios create new security challenges which must be considered by protocol´s designers in order to achieve the same security capabilities as in those protocols designed for mobile payment systems based on a ´Full connectivity´ scenario (where all the entities can exchange messages with each other without intermediaries). In this paper, we propose an anonymous payment protocol for a Client Centric Mobile Scenario where the merchant has no direct communication with the acquirer due to absence of Internet access in her infrastructure, and the unaffordability of other communication technologies due to the inconveniences and costs associated. The proposed protocol uses symmetric-key operations which require low computational power and can be processed much faster than asymetric ones. As a result, our proposal illustrates how a merchant can sell goods in a secure way even if she can not directly communicate with the acquirer.