Design and implementation of a micropayment protocol in electronic commerce environments

An electronic micropayment system, one of electronic payment systems, is suitable especially when a small amount of money is to be paid frequently in order to purchase on-line goods (i.e., database search, software distributor electronic news service, etc). In addition, since the amount of payment is small, possible damages caused by system failures are lower than other payment systems. In this paper, a micropayment protocol in electronic commerce environments on the Internet is proposed, based on the PayWord system. And a micropayment electronic commerce system which executes the protocol proposed is implemented. Unlike the PayWord system, however, the micropayment protocol proposed in this paper is designed in such a way that a merchant does not need to request a payment at the end of every business day since a customer cannot purchase goods beyond length of hash chains, which is specified on a certificate. In addition, the system is able to check the validity as well as the duplicate spending of hash chains. The electronic micropayment system with the proposed protocol consists of Customers, Merchants and Brokers. Customers are implemented on Windows NT 4.0 using VC++. Merchants are implemented on Solaris 2.5.1 and gcc 2.8.0 using Netscape Web Server and CGI methods. HP UX 10.20 is used for Brokers.