Automatic Teller Machines for Offline E-cash
This work addresses the practical problem of offline e-cash withdrawals for users who lack reliable bank connections, but the contribution is incremental as it extends existing compact e-cash protocols.
The paper proposes a new cryptographic bearer token for offline e-cash that can be dispensed by ATMs, enabling decentralized withdrawals without a central bank. The scheme provides anonymity, unforgeability, and untraceability, building on compact e-cash protocols.
Electronic cash (e-cash) is a digital alternative to physical currency that allows anonymous transactions between users and merchants. Typically, coins in an e-cash scheme are only dispensed through a central bank. A drawback of this approach is that the bank is always on the critical path during withdrawals, and if a reliable connection to the bank is temporarily unavailable, users may be unable to withdraw coins in a timely fashion. As with physical currency, there are benefits to supporting a decentralized infrastructure where withdrawals can be performed without involving the bank in the critical path. We propose the design of a new cryptographic bearer token that can be dispensed by automatic teller machines (ATM) in a fully offline e-cash scheme. Such bearer tokens provide anonymity, unforgeability and untraceability, i.e., users cannot be tracked by their spending activities or the locations of withdrawal. We formalize the requirements of an e-cash scheme with multiple issuers and propose an efficient design building on top of the compact e-cash protocol of Camenisch et al. (EUROCRYPT 2005). Our construction leverages an unforgeable and doubly-anonymous voucher that allows a one-time transfer of coins between an ATM and a user, while hiding their identities from parties not involved in the transaction.