Micro-payment Protocol Based on Multiple Hash Chains

With the development of electronic commerce, more and more transactions on information goods or services have been or will be conducted through the Internet, which involve small value payment that called micro-payment. Therefore, micro-payment is one of the most popular research aspects with focus on the field of electronic payment. Many efficient micro-payment schemes were proposed based on PayWord which was designed by Ronald Rivest and Adi Shamir. The biggest virtue of PayWord is the adoption of hash operation instead of using public-key operations in per payment as much as possible. However, PayWord scheme has some drawbacks described as followed: firstly, generated e-coins only connecting with one particular vendor; secondly, only one unit value or one kind of currency is provided; and thirdly, PayWord scheme does not provide revocation mechanism. In this article, a new micro-payment protocol is introduced, which is also based on hash chain, but based on multiple hash chains to achieve the following goals: multiple unit value payment, multiple transactions and merchant and providing revocation sub-protocol.