Taler: Usable, privacy-preserving payments for the Web
Abstract
GNU Taler is a new electronic online payment system which provides
privacy for customers and accountability for merchants. It uses an
exchange service to issue digital coins using blind signatures,
and is thus not subject to the performance issues that plague
Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus-based solutions.
The focus of this paper is addressing the challenges payment systems
face in the context of the Web. We discuss how to address
Web-specific challenges, such as handling bookmarks and sharing of
links, as well as supporting users that have disabled JavaScript. Web
payment systems must also navigate various constraints imposed by
modern Web browser security architecture, such as same-origin policies
and the separation between browser extensions and Web pages. While
our analysis focuses on how Taler operates within the security
infrastructure provided by the modern Web, the results partially
generalize to other payment systems.
We also include the perspective of merchants, as existing systems have
often struggled with securing payment information at the merchant's
side. Here, challenges include avoiding database transactions for
customers that do not actually go through with the purchase, as well
as cleanly separating security-critical functions of the payment
system from the rest of the Web service.
Origin : Files produced by the author(s)
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