With the onset of the Information Age, our nation is becoming increasingly dependent upon network communications. Computer-based technology is significantly impacting our ability to access, store, and distribute information. Among the most important uses of this technology is electronic commerce: performing financial transactions via electronic information exchanged over telecommunications lines. Most electronic commerce involves the exchange of money for goods or services .A key requirement for electronic commerce is the development of secure and efficient electronic payment systems. The need for security is highlighted by the rise of the Internet, which promises to be a leading medium for future electronic commerce.
Electronic payment systems come in many forms including digital checks, debit cards, credit cards, and stored value cards. The most popular consumer electronic transfers are automated payments of auto loans, insurance payments, & mortgage payments made from consumer’s checking accounts. The usual security features for such systems are privacy (protection from eavesdropping), authenticity (provides user identification and message integrity), and no repudiation (prevention of later denying having performed a transaction).
The type of electronic payment system focused on in this paper is electronic cash. As the name implies, electronic cash is an attempt to construct an electronic payment system modeled after our paper cash system. Paper cash has such features as being: portable (easily carried), recognizable (as legal tender) hence readily acceptable, transferable (without involvement of the financial network), untraceable (no record of where money is spent), anonymous (no record of who spent the money) and has the ability to make "change." The designers of electronic cash focused on preserving the features of intractability and anonymity. Thus, electronic cash is defined to be an electronic payment system