Non-repudiation of consumption of mobile Internet services with privacy support

Today´s Internet technology is able to support different quality-of-service (QoS) classes to meet different application and user requirements. Combined with the support of user mobility, service providers offer differentiated services not only to their own customers, but also to roaming users. This offer is accompanied normally by more complex pricing schemes which require a complex accounting of the real service consumption. As commercial provisioning of Internet services needs to meet security requirements of providers as well as users, the service consumption must be provable to justify billing and to protect users and providers against other malicious parties. This paper develops the NorCIS architecture (non-repudiation of the consumption of Internet services) and its detailed protocol interactions which allow for the generation and transfer of non-repudiation evidences of service consumptions in a mobile Internet protocol (IP)-based environment. An evidence structure is proposed, supporting a variety of accounting schemes and including information which are used to protect against various attacks. In addition, NorCIS proposes the use of virtual identifiers within evidences to support the privacy of users´ identities.