Privacy protection for transactions of digital goods

• Main Authors: BAO, Feng, DENG, Robert H.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2001
• Subjects: Information Security
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1103; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2102/viewcontent/Bao_Deng2001_PrivacyProtectionForTransaction_pv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In this paper we study the problem of how to protect users’ privacy in web transactions of digital goods. In particular, we introduce a system which allows a user to disclose his/her identity information (such as user account or credit card number) to a web site in exchange for a digital item, but prevents the web site from learning which specific item the user intends to obtain. The problem concerned here is orthogonal to the problem of anonymous transactions [RSG98], [RR98] but commensurate with the general problem of PIR (private information retrieval) [CGK95]