Anonymity-aware face-to-face mobile payment

On-line payments are increasingly popular in paying bills for Internet shopping, and payment-capable mobile phones support making purchases anytime and anywhere, without cash. However, mobile payments are rarely used for making face-to-face payments, with concerns about anonymity, security, and usability. This paper proposes a face-to-face mobile payment protocol that addresses these concerns. To address anonymity and security concerns, the proposed protocol uses unique information for the payment transaction, such as the location and the time, and introduces two procedures for optimizing the matching time slots and exchanging random numbers when needed, to secure the transactions without exposing the seller’s or the buyer’s personal identification. To address usability concerns, the proposed protocol optimizes the parameters for the two introduced procedures to match the seller-buyer pairs, depending on the number of the people involved in the mobile payments, the delays caused by human operations with the mobile phones, mobile communication, and so on. Experimental results prove that the proposed protocol is practical, solving the addressed concerns.