Project No.: 5003-054558 01.07.98 - 31.12.99

Project leader: Dr. Holger Petersen, r3 security engineering, Glattzentrum
e-mail: petersen@r3.ch

Name of project: MicPay: Micropayment schemes for correlated payments

Partners:
Dr. Karin Busch, Swisscom Corporate Technology, Bern
Prof. Bernhard Plattner, Inst. f. techn. Informatik und Kommunikationsnetze, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich (ETHZ)

Funding: Sfr 299,423.-

Summary:
Conventional payment by cash is limited to the value of the smallest coin (e.g. one cent). This can pose a problem when obtaining the current price of a share on the stock market or making a single query of a database, for example. In conventional commerce, the solution has been to use a subscription mode of payment in advance. However, this shuts out a potentially large customer base of people who may only wish to use a service very occasionally. If such micropayments are to be possible, communication costs must be kept to an absolute minimum. This is achievable with correlated payments, using a JAVA smartcard-based technique. The results of the development will be applied to the Hypernews project (Konstantas 5003-045333) and Internet telephony (IP Phone) payments.

Cooperation:
Project partners are r3 security engineering, CUI of the University of Geneva, Swisscom, Institut für technische Informatik und Kommunikationsnetze, ETHZ.