An Optimistic Payment Protocol with Mobile Agents in Hostile Environments

Abstract

Mobile agents are autonomous software entities that are able to migrate across different execution environments. The characteristics of mobile agents make them ideal for electronic commerce applications in open networks. Security is a fundamental precondition for the acceptance of mobile agent systems. In this paper, using Pedersen's verifiable secret sharing scheme and the theory of cross validation we propose a payment protocol with the following features: (1) protect the confidentiality of sensitive payment information from spying by malicious hosts, (2) use a trusted third party in a minimal way, (3) can verify the validity of the share by the merchant, (4) allows agent to verify that the product which he is about to receive is the one he is paying for.