Identity-bound accounting

When someone is providing a service, he or she also is likely to have an incentive to get compensation from the users of the service for the efforts invested in the service. This calls for proper accounting mechanisms. However, if there is a party that disputes the correctness of this procedure, one needs to be able to present evidence about the incurred costs. In this paper, we investigate secure mechanisms for generating such evidence, which are strongly bound to the identities of the parties with cryptographic means. Thus, in the case of dispute the involvement of the party in question can be proved. While many different kind of network level accounting systems have been devised before, our implementation is based on the existence of a secure identity and employment of hash chains.