Chrg-http: A Tool for Micropayments on the World Wide Web
Lei Tang, Carnegie Mellon University
Steven Low, University of Melbourne
Abstract
Chrg-http is a simple and secure protocol for electronic
payments over the Internet, especially in an intranet environment. It
is designed to support those micropayments (or more specific,
electronic publishing, which have costs ranging from pennies to a few
dollars. A widely used secure system Kerberos V5 has been
incorporated into the http protocol. The security and authentication
of a transactions is provided by Kerberos, without expensive
public-key cryptographic computations, or on-line processing through a
centralized payment processing server, which is the case to most of
the existing electronic payment systems on the World Wide Web. Our
implementation is based on the billing model (or the subscription
model). The simplicity of the model also helps to reduce the charging
cost overhead.
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