Abstract
Rivest and Shamir[2] proposed a system for generating micro-payment ‘coins’ using an engine that finds collisions in the output of a hash function. Such coins, they argued, would be quick to verify. Furthermore, by virtue of the birthday paradox, the cost of generation a large number of coins could be kept to an acceptable level through economies of scale while the cost of generating a small number of forgeries would be high compared to the return.
In this paper we examine the practicalities of building a MicroMint and we question some of the security statements made in the original paper.
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References
J. Gillmore, editor. Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics & Chip Design. O’Reilly & Associates, 1998.
Ronald L. Rivest and Adi Shamir. Payword and micromint: Two simple micropayment schemes. (A preliminary version has appeared in CryptoBytes 3,1 (Spring 1996), pages 7–11. The full version is posted by Rivest on the Web.), 1995.
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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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van Someren, N. (2002). The Practical Problems of Implementing MicroMint. In: Syverson, P. (eds) Financial Cryptography. FC 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2339. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46088-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46088-8_3
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