Pay Word and MicroMint : Two Simple Micropayment Schemes

Abstract

1 Introduction We present two simple micropayment schemes, "PayWord " and "MicroMint, " for making small purchases over the Internet. We were inspired to work on this problem by DEC's "Millicent " scheme[10]. Surveys of some electronic payment schemes can be found in HallamBaker [6], Schneier[16], and Wayner[18]. Our main goal is to minimize the number of public-key operations required per payment, using hash operations instead whenever possible. As a rough guide, hash functions are about 100 times faster than RSA signature verification, and about 10,000 times faster than RSA signature generation: on a typical workstation, one can sign two messages per second, verify 200 signatures per second, and compute 20,000 hash function values per second.