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Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
INTERNET DRAFT Phillip M. Hallam-Baker
November 22nd 1995 World Wide Web Consortium
Expires May 27th 1996 email: <hallam@w3.org>
Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 0.1
<draft-hallam-micropayment-00.txt>
Status of this Memo
This draft, filename draft-hallam-baker-internet-micropayment-00.txt
is intended to be become one or more Proposed Standard RFCs. It is
also available as hypertext as a World Wide Web Consortium Working
Draft as http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-mptp951122.html.
Distribution of this document is unlimited. Comments should be sent
to the author <hallam@w3.org>.
This document is an Internet-Draft. Internet-Drafts are working
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Phillip M. Hallam-Baker Page 1
Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
Abstract
A protocol for transfer of payments through the services of a common
broker is described. The processing demands of the protocol make it
practical for small payment amounts. The latency makes it practical
for use in interactive applications. The scheme thus satisfies the
two key criteria for a micropayments scheme. MPTP implements a
variation of the Pay-Word proposal of Rivest and Shamir
[RivestSh95]. It is also inspired by the Millicent proposal by
Manasse [Manasse95] and the iKP proposal by Bellare et. al.
[BellareEt95]. A proposal similar to the PayWord scheme by Torben
Pedersen [Pedersen9?] was reported after this draft was begun.
For efficiency it is desirable to be able to combine transfer of
payments instructions with those accomplishing the delivery of
goods. For this reason MPTP may be layered on a variety of Internet
protocols including HTTP and SMTP/MIME.
Although the protocol is optimized for use as a payment scheme it is
suitable for the transfer of larger amounts. The protocol is also
suitable for use as an access control or resource allocation
mechanism. With modification the protocol could be made to provide
anonymity guarantees.
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker Page 2
Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
Contents
* Introduction ...................................................... 5
o Principles and Parties ........................................ 6
o Risk Model .................................................... 7
o Policy ........................................................ 8
o Mechanism ..................................................... 9
o Signature .................................................... 10
o Certificates and establishment of trust. ..................... 11
o Distributed Implementation ................................... 12
o Risk Control ................................................. 12
- Credit Liability ......................................... 12
- Credit Abuse ............................................. 13
- Counterfeiting ........................................... 13
- Unauthorized Withdrawal .................................. 13
- Purchase Order Modification .............................. 13
- Double Spending .......................................... 13
- Failure to Credit Payment ................................ 14
- Denial of Service ........................................ 14
- Repudiation .............................................. 14
- Failure to deliver ....................................... 14
- Framing .................................................. 14
* Message Formats .................................................. 15
o Account Establishment and Maintenance ........................ 15
- Create Account ........................................... 16
- Reissue Certificate ...................................... 16
- Delete Account ........................................... 16
- Account Certificate ...................................... 17
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker Page 3
Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
o Payment Dataflow ............................................. 17
- Authority ................................................ 17
- Charge ................................................... 18
o Vendor-Broker Communications
- Collection Request ....................................... 18
- Collection Response ...................................... 19
- Validation Request ....................................... 19
- Validation Response ...................................... 19
- Revocation List .......................................... 19
* Processing of Data Flows ......................................... 19
o Account Creation ............................................. 20
o Account Modification, Enquiry, Deletion ...................... 20
o Payment Flow ................................................. 20
o Collection Flow .............................................. 22
* Resource and Performance Analysis ................................ 22
o Latency ...................................................... 22
- Establishment of Payments Session ........................ 22
- Subsequent Payments ...................................... 22
o Processing ................................................... 22
- Customer ................................................. 22
- Vendor ................................................... 23
- Broker ................................................... 23
o Storage ...................................................... 23
- Customer ................................................. 23
- Vendor ................................................... 23
- Broker ................................................... 24
* Commentary and Further Work ...................................... 24
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker Page 4
Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
o Benchmarks and statistics .................................... 24
o Risk factors ................................................. 24
o Inter-Broker Settlement Model ................................ 25
o Wider Applications ........................................... 26
* Security Considerations .......................................... 26
* Patent Rights .................................................... 26
* References. ...................................................... 26
* Acknowledgements ................................................. 28
* Contact .......................................................... 28
* To Do List ....................................................... 28
Introduction
Commerce on the Internet may be broadly divided into three
categories, advertising, sale of tangible goods and sale of
non-tangible goods. Advertising is not directly considered in this
paper. Movement of tangible goods requires handling and shipping
whose costs set a minimum value for which trading is economic and
introduces a substantial delay into the process. Speed and cost of
processing are thus not the critical factors in evaluating payment
systems for this application. Where non-tangible goods are involved
the contract may in many cases be fulfilled through the internet.
There is a large interest in payment systems which support charging
relatively small amounts for a unit of information. Here the speed
and cost of processing payments are critical factors in assessing a
schemes usability. Fast user response is essential if the user is to
be encouraged to make a large number of purchases. Processing and
storage requirements placed on brokers and vendors must be economic
for low value transactions. MPTP is optimized for use for low value
transfers between parties who have a relationship over a period of
time. It also provides a high degree of protection against fraud
making it applicable in wider scenarios, including sale of tangible
goods.
The following performance statistics were used as a guide in
designing the protocol [RivestSh95]. Current workstation and high
end personal computer class machines are capable of approximately
two public key signature creation operations, two hundred public key
verification operations and 20,000 one way hash functions per
second. Latency introduced by round trip communications may be a
second or more, the time taken for a signal to be relayed by a
satellite in geostationary orbit. Communications also introduce
potential unreliability.
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker Page 5
Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
A distinction is made between the cost of inline and offline
processing. Inline processing takes place on the critical path for
payments. Servers must thus have substantial excess capacity to deal
with fluctuation in demand. Offline processing may be performed
asynchronously when processing load permits. As a rough estimate
inline processing was considered to incur two orders of magnitude
more cost than offline processing.
In addition to processing costs, the cost of online storage must be
borne in mind. If online storage must be accessed during a payment
transfer the cost of storing the data in RAM or of disk head
contention must be considered.
MPTP is an asynchronous protocol. Much of the processing required
may be done offline. In particular payment does not require an
online communication with the broker (unless the symmetric signature
option is used). MPTP is also symmetric, there is no distinction
between customer and vendor accounts except in relation to specific
transactions where the flow of payment is generally in a single
direction. The ability to make payments need not preclude the
ability to accept payments unless this is a matter of broker policy.
However in some cases it might be desirable to have different
accounts for these functions, a vendor accepting large payments
might wish to avoid the danger of a security compromise allowing
unauthorized payments to be made via the Internet accept only
account.
One of the most significant differences between the World Wide Web
and print media is that the cost of publishing on the Web is
commensurate with the cost of readership and does not involve a high
capital outlay. Many of the initial users of the Web were primarily
interested in publishing existing information, both within
organizations and to the wider internet community. One important
characteristic which a Web micropayment scheme must satisfy is that
it permit access to commercial publication to both small and large
publishers. MPTP provides for transfer of small payment amounts
through vendor amortization. Use of public key signature screening
as opposed to verification makes it economic for use by small
publishers.
Principles and Parties
MPTP involves three parties, a customer _C_ who makes the payment, a
vendor _V_ who receives the payment and a broker _B_ who keeps
accounts for the parties concerned. At present only a single broker
model is considered, this means that both customer and vendor must
share the same broker. Note however that the protocol does not
restrict the broker to use of a single server.
Such a capability is essential if customers are to be able to surf
the Web using a single payment account and vendors are to be able to
accept payments from any source through a single account. Although
accounts are in principle being used by both customers and vendors
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker Page 6
Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
it is likely that brokers will wish to specialize in particular
types of account. ISPs for example have an existing client base
which is billed on a regular basis. Issuing bills requires a very
different type of procedure to issuing payments however and thus
vendor support may require the services of a specialist broker.
Support for Inter-Broker transfers will be required in the long term
to permit the system to be scaled effectively. Some notes on the
technical and political difficulties involved are made in the
commentary section at the end.
It is important that a payment protocol does not interfere with the
established trust relationships between the parties. Where a
protocol allows collection of data on another parties activity this
should be made clear in advance. It is not a requirement that the
protocol duplicate the trust models of a particular financial
instrument precisely. It is more important that the protocol provide
flexibility in the establishment of trust relationships than attempt
to define which party accepts what risk.
The term Broker is used to refer to a financial intermediary. In the
context of this proposal a broker might be any organization with the
ability to bill a significant number of customers at a small
marginal cost. This means that in addition to use by financial
institutions MPTP might be suitable for use by Internet Service
Providers (ISPs), telephone companies or any other organization
sending out large numbers of invoices.
Risk Model
[The risk model will be developed in depth in a companion paper. It
is intended that the risk model be comprehensive, permitting cross
comparisons between different types of schemes to be made.]
The main risks faced by the customer are liability for unauthorized
payment and either not receiving the goods at all or receiving goods
different from those advertised. The vendor risks not being paid.
The broker risks the cost of customer service due to malfunction or
incompatibilities and liability for payments in cases where the
customer and vendor are in dispute.
The following risks were considered:
Credit Abuse
An account is used to make repeated payments without intention
to pay.
Counterfeiting
A fake payment order is constructed.
Unauthorized Withdrawal
The broker (or an employee) makes an unauthorized withdrawal
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from an account.
Purchase order modification.
A customer issues a payment order intending to purchase one set
of goods but the order is intercepted and modified by a third
party.
Failure to Credit Payment
The broker debits the customer account but does not credit the
vendor account.
Double Spending
A payment instruction is used twice, either by a customer, a
vendor or a third party.
Denial of Service
A customer or vendor is denied use of their account.
Repudiation
A party may deny making a payment.
Credit liability
Where a customer is extended credit liability must be
controlled.
Failure to Deliver
A vendor may accept payment but fail to supply the advertised
goods.
Framing
A party is able to convince another that a third party acted in
bad faith.
In many cases it is in the interests of a party to accept risk.
A broker may offer to guarantee payments to vendors irrespective
of whether the customer pays and require a payment of a higher
commission in return. The high cost of customer service
enquiries must be borne in mind. Protocols which cannot clearly
identify which party was at fault are likely to incur
substantial customer service costs.
Policy
The interests of the parties may conflict. In such cases the choice
of which parties interest will be prioritized is a matter of policy.
MPTP is designed to be policy neutral, permitting a broker to offer
a wide number of policy options. Individual vendors may thus choose
the precise terms on which they offer goods. Customers may choose
the terms they are willing to accept on a vendor by vendor basis
One of the areas in which conflict of interest occurs is whether
goods are to be delivered before or after payment. It is in the
customers interest to withhold payment until the goods are delivered
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker Page 8
Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
to ensure that they are satisfactory. The Vendor may wish to
ensuring payment is made by insisting of payment in advance however.
As previously noted it may be in the interest of the vendor to
encourage customers to purchase goods by accepting a degree of risk.
This is particularly important when the vendor has no established
reputation with the customer. This risk may be made acceptable to
the vendor provided there is a high enough probability that payment
will be made. In the green-commerce model [SteinStBoRo94] the broker
acts to encourage this by monitoring the number of refusals made by
a customer and excluding customers with a bad track record.
MPTP permits a considerable degree of flexibility in establishing a
payments policy. A vendor may permit a customer a certain amount of
trade before requiring a firm payment commitment or require all
purchases to be paid for in advance. The first policy may be
applicable where the goods offered cannot be evaluated by the
customer in advance. A Vendor who has established a reputation with
the customer may be in a position to insist on prior payment.
As an example consider the vendor of a software program who wishes
to charge for its use on an hourly basis. The vendor may be willing
to offer a customer a free trial provided there is a guarantee that
the customer cannot simply request a fresh retrial each time a trial
expires.
Mechanism
In the Pay Word scheme a payment order consists of two parts, a
digitally signed payment authority and a separate payment token
which determines the amount. A chained hash function,is used to
authenticate the token. These are described by Lamport [Lamport81]
and employed in the S/Key [Haler94] authorization mechanism. To
create the payment authority the customer first chooses a value _w_n
_at random. The customer then calculates a chain of payment tokens
(or _paychain_) _w_0, w_1, ... w_n _ by computing
_w_i = h (w_i+1)_
Where h is a cryptographically secure one way has function such as
MD5 [Rivest92c] or SHA [AccreditedSC93a].
The signed payment authority contains _w_0_, the root of the payment
chain and defines a value for each link in the chain. Payments are
made by revealing successive paychain tokens. Once the vendor or
broker has authenticated a payment authority an arbitrary payment
token may be authenticated by performing successive hash functions
and comparing against the root value. It should be noted however
that the broker is only presented with the final payment order. It
is therefore unnecessary for the broker to maintain large online
databases.
MPTP permits use of double payment chains. This allows
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker Page 9
Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
implementation of a broker mediated satisfaction guarantee scheme.
The pair of payment chains represent the high and low watermarks for
the payment order. The low watermark chain represents the amount
that the customer has fully committed to pay. The high watermark
chain represents partial commitments. The vendor exposure is the
difference between the counter values.
MPTP also supports use of multiple payment counters denoting
different units of currency. This allows some optimization of
processing time through shortening of the payment chains.
MPTP provides protection against double spending through vendor and
broker checking of authority identifiers. The size of required
Vendor authority identifier matching tables (th _double spending
buffer_may be controlled by checking that the authority timestamp is
within bounds. An alternative approach would incorporate
challenge/response sequence into the session establishment protocol.
This could be used to simplify broker double spending prevention
measures if constraints were placed on the challenge identifiers.
The reduction in vendor resource requirements do not appear to
justify an additional round trip delay however.
The mechanism could be modified to use a collection of payment
tokens as opposed to a chain. Each token would consist of a the hash
of a shared secret which would be revealed to make a payment. This
might provide a solution to possible patent difficulties concerning
the use of the Lamport hash chain mechanism. It would also permit
payments to take place in parallel.
Signature
MPTP permits use of both shared secret and public key based
signature schemes. Schneier [Schneier96] describes a wide variety of
public key signatures schemes and one way hash functions suitable
for constructing Message Authentication Codes (_MACs_). Choice of
algorithm, key length etc. is left to the parties involved. It is
desirable to minimize the latency introduced in the signing of the
initial payment order and also to minimize computational needs of
the vendor and broker.
A number of digital signature techniques permit some calculations to
be performed offline, i.e. in advance of the message being known
[EvenGoMi90]. Such schemes include the Digital Signature Standard
[NIST91] and El-Gamal [ElGamal95]. Pre-calculation permits the time
taken to generate a signature to be performed outside the human
interaction loop and thus appear transparent to the user. Note
however that many MPTP applications may chose to perform speculative
calculation of an authority in advance of user instructions, unused
calculations would simply be discarded. Note however that use of
this technique might negatively interact with techniques intended to
prevent double spending since a user might delay sending the
authority for a significant time.
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A recent proposal by Shamir [Shamir95] permits signatures to be
validated very rapidly, although at the cost of introducing a small
risk that an invalid signature will be accepted. Shamir describes a
variation of the Rabin [Rabin79] signature scheme which permits
signatures to be "screened" using a test which will detect a
fraudulent signature half the time and never reject a valid one. The
scheme may be applied repeatedly to provide the desired degree of
assurance as to the authenticity of the result.
The signature screening approach has a number of characteristics
which are particularly suitable for micropayment schemes. The degree
of assurance may be adjusted to reflect the level of risk. Small
payments might be accepted with only minimal checking and additional
checks performed as the risk increased. another useful property is
that the level of protection may be adjusted to reflect server load.
This is especially important since it substantially reduces the
excess server capacity required to cope with peaks in demand and
allows unexpected increases in demand to be dealt with in an orderly
manner.
A final signature option is to used a shared secret and keyed
digest. This requires the customer and broker to establish a shared
secret and for the broker to provide an online verification service.
Use of shared secret authentication permits rapid generation of
payment authorities. Validation of such authorities requires
communication between vendor and broker which may incur a delay.
Certificates and establishment of trust.
Certificates bind a public key to an account number under the public
key of the broker. It is assumed that the broker public key is known
to all parties. Implementations might require broker public keys to
be verified through some additional means.
Each party generates their own public-private key pair locally. The
public key certificate is communicated to the broker at account
establishment.
The certificate issuance policy may require frequent re-issuance of
certificates to enable close control of credit risks or permit
certificates to be valid for longer periods of time. It is not
necessary for a re-issued certificate to establish a new public key.
Account revocation lists are supported to enable credit risks to be
prevented from engaging in further abuse. Separate certificate
revocation lists are not supported since compromise of public key
certificates may be dealt with through the same mechanism.
Where an account has special attributes concerned with risk
management these attributes should be included in and authenticated
by the certificate. For example an account might be limited to
making payment orders for no more than a certain amount. A broker
might chose to guarantee payments up to a certain amount but require
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an authorization to guarantee payments for larger amounts.
Alternatively a broker might require a vendor to accept the risk
regardless of amount and authorization. The following certificate
attributes are supported:
IP-Address _mask_, _value_
Specifies a set of internet addresses for which the certificate
is valid. Only payment requests originating from IP addresses
which equal the specified value after being logically ANDed with
the mask. If more than one IP-Address attribute is specified a
single match is sufficient.
Not Guaranteed _amount_
The broker will not guarantee that payment will be made for
amounts exceeding the specified amount.
Guaranteed _amount_
The broker guarantees payment up to the specified amount without
separate authorization.
Authorization-Required _amount_
Payments above the specified amount require separate
authorization to be guaranteed.
Distributed Implementation
The offline nature of PayWord lends itself well to a fully
distributed solution. It is not necessary for the Broker to use a
single server for all customers.
Online verification of credit-worthiness (e.g. in the symmetric
signature scheme) requires a vendor to have access to a server which
holds the authentication information. This information may be
encoded in the account certificate.
Risk Control
Having described the risk model and mechanism of MPTP we describe
the manner in which risk may be controlled.
Credit Liability
If a broker chooses to act as guarantor for a payment a credit
liability risk may be incurred. Note that MPTP supports an option
for the broker to transfer this risk to the vendor by refusing a
guarantee of payment.
In either case a credit liability is incurred. Such liabilities are
a familiar consideration in the financial industry. A similar risk
is accepted in parts of the publishing industry where newspapers are
sold from unattended vending machines which cannot control the
number of copies taken by each customer. In certain countries no
precautions are taken to prevent a copy being taken without any
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker Page 12
Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
payment at all.
Credit Abuse
The problem of credit abuse is linked to but distinct from that of
credit liability risks. For example an account might be created in a
false name and its authentication information widely published with
the intention of permitting general access to charged material for
free.
Credit abuse might be discovered through broker tracing of payment
patterns to detect sudden increases in payment activity and then
terminated through the revocation list mechanism. The case of
widespread use of a single connection may be controlled through
checking of the certificate IP-Address attribute if specified. If no
IP address attribute is specified a vendor might employ code to
detect accesses from multiple IP addresses within a suspiciously
short interval.
Counterfeiting
MPTP payment orders are vendor specific and digitally signed.
Provided the signature scheme is secure it is not possible for a
party to construct a payment order without having access to the
secret information corresponding to the key.
Unauthorized Withdrawal
Unauthorized withdrawal is not possible without detection by the
account holder who may require an audit trail from the broker for
each transaction. Note that this requires the broker to maintain a
substantial quantity of online logging information.
Purchase Order Modification
In a purchase order modification attack an external party modifies a
purchase request in order to cause different goods to be delivered.
This risk is not directly addressed in the MPTP scheme although the
satisfaction guaranteed policy might be used to protect the
customer.
Without authentication of the purchase order there is no method of
avoiding this attack. The cost of this authentication might be
reduced by establishing a shared key between vendor and customer
during the session establishment protocol. Such shared keys might
have a lifetime spanning several payment orders.
Double Spending
Payment orders are specific to a particular vendor and carry a
unique authority identifier. A broker is required to detect an
attempt to deposit the same payment order more than once and act
accordingly. In some cases this may mean increasing the amount of
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Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
payment authorized.
Failure to Credit Payment
Currently MPTP does not address this risk. A Broker may deliberately
deduct a payment amount from the account of one party without making
a corresponding credit to another party.
One approach to this problem is to make information concerning bad
debts available for scrutiny. A broker might be required to issue a
frequent list of bad debts signed under the broker's public key.
Such debts might be rendered unlinkable through a use of a one way
hash function on the authority identifier. The proportion of bad
debts might be concealed through addition of padding. In this way
both customer and vendor could ensure that the broker acted in good
faith.
Denial of Service
Denial of service is a significant risk, unfortunately it is one
that the underlying infrastructure of the Internet does not protect
against. Consequently any application protocol level protection
against a denial of service attack can at best provide limited
protection against this risk.
Use of Shamir's signature screening algorithm substantially reduces
the risk of a denial of service attack against a vendor or broker
through construction of bogus payment orders.
Repudiation
MPTP payment orders are non-repudiable in the sense that the
customer cannot deny having made a payment authorization. This is
distinct from the option for a vendor or broker to permit a customer
the right to refuse payment after receiving the goods.
Failure to deliver
Failure to deliver may occur for many reasons including vendor
fraud. The Internet is an unreliable transport medium and a customer
may in good faith offer to buy an article and a vendor in good faith
may intend to supply but delivery fail nevertheless. The HTTP
protocol in particular does not currently provide for customer
acknowledgment of receipt.
One solution to the failure to deliver risk is to permit the
customer to refuse payment through the "satisfaction guaranteed"
policy described earlier.
Framing
The vendor has the opportunity to frame a customer, albeit at a
direct monetary loss to himself. In this scenario a vendor receives
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker Page 14
Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
a valid payment chain from a customer but chooses not to deliver the
authorization paychain token, instead delivering only the promissory
paychain token. The vendor is thus able to frame the customer,
albeit at the cost of the payment.
This risk is not currently addressed in MPTP. One approach to
addressing this risk would be for the customer to opt to make the
payment during account reconciliation.
Message Formats
In this draft we describe the message content without entering into
consideration of the corresponding byte streams. We assume that a
systematic encoding of these message formats is employed such as the
Basic Encoding Rules ASN.1. Choice of encoding rules is left to the
working group. It is assumed that the encoding permits payment
messages to be transport via standard Internet protocols through
simple processing (e.g. BASE-64 encoding).
We define the following data types which are of general use:
Identifier : Array [Octet]
Amount : Struct
value Integer
currency Identifier
Signed [Any] : Struct
data Any
certificate AccountCertificate
signature_algorithm Identifier
signature Identifier
Wrapper [Any] : Struct
version Identifier
message-id Identifier
data Any
All messages are transported enveloped using the Wrapper structure
which states the protocol version and message identifier.
Account Establishment and Maintenance
The following account options are supported:
Accept Payments Only
The account will only accept payment.
Refuse Payments
The account does not accept payments of any type.
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Refuse Micropayment
The account permits payments to be made to it but cannot
initiate micropayments. Such accounts may be useful for
customers who may wish to be able to transfer money into their
account but do not require the ability to accept large numbers
of arbitrarily small payments.
Create Account
Account creation requires a binding to be established between an
account identifier supplied by the broker, a public key supplied by
the potential client and billing information. The exact nature of
the billing information is left to implementations.
CreateAccountRequest : Struct
public_key PublicKey
identity_binding ???
AccountFlag : Choice
AcceptPaymentsOnly
RefusePayments
RefuseMicroPayments
It might be appropriate to encrypt the identity binding information.
Reissue Certificate
Depending on broker policy certificates may require frequent
reissue. This process may or may not require the establishment of a
new public key. Note that this is not a suitable mechanism for
dealing with certificate compromise situations.
ReissueCertificateRequest : Signed [ReissueCertificateData]
ReissueCertificateData : Struct
account_id Identifier
public_key PublicKey
Delete Account
The delete account message is used to terminate an account.
DeleteAccountRequest : Signed [DeleteAccount]
DeleteAccount : Struct
account_id Identifier
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Account Certificate
The account certificate is returned by the broker in response to an
account creation request.
AccountCertificate : Signed [AccountData]
AccountData : Struct
account_id Identifier
flags Set[AccountFlags]
credit_limit Amount
broker_servers List [BrokerServer]
attributes List [Attribute]
not_valid_before Date
not_valid_after Date
Attribute : Choice
IPAddress
mask Address
value Address
NotGuaranteed
amount Amount
Guaranteed
amount Amount
AuthorizationRequired
amount Amount
Payment Dataflow
The payment dataflow consists of three phases. First an account
authority is created, next a sequence of paywords is transferred,
finally a termination message closes the payment session. Payment
sessions may span multiple transport sessions.
A payment authority may optionally incorporate a direct payment
instruction which does not require confirmation using a pay-chain.
Authority
Authority : Signed [AuthorityData]
AuthorityData : Struct
version Identifier
authority_id Identifier
payer_id Identifier
recipient_id Identifier
date Date
hash_algorithm Identifier
chains List [PayChain]
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PayChain : Struct
flags Set[ChainFlag]
amount Amount
ChainFlag : Choice
Accepted
Pending
BrokerServer : Struct
address Array [Octet]
port Array [Octet]
quality Integer
It is assumed for the sake of convenience that all pay-chains under
a given authority will employ the same hash function.
Charge
Charge : Struct
authority_id Identifier
paywords List [PayWords]
terminate Boolean
PayWord : Struct
pay_word Array [Octet]
increment Integer
The terminate flag terminates a payments session and informs the
vendor that no further payments are to be made.
Vendor-Broker Communications
The collection process permits the vendor to collect payment on
paychains
Collection Request
A collection request consists simply of a list of authority, charge
pairs.
CollectionRequest : Struct
account_id Identifier
collections List [Collection]
Collection : Struct
authority Authority
charge Charge
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Collection Response
There is no need to respond with an affirmation for every payment.
Simply provide a list of the duds.
CollectionResponse : Struct
status BrokerStatus
refusals List [ChainResponse]
ChainResponse : Struct
authority_id Identifier
reason RefusalReason
Validation Request
Validation requests are required whenever symmetric key signatures
are employed. Validation requests might also be required as a matter
of broker policy in certain circumstances, such as purchases for
large amounts or to guarantee payments.
ValidationRequest : Struct
vendor_id Identifier
authority Authority
Validation Response
ValidationResponse : Struct
broker_id Identifier
vendor_id Identifier
authority_id Identifier
response ValidationResponseCode
ValidationResponseCode : Choice
Authorized
NotAuthorized
Revocation List
RevocationList : List [Revocation]
Revocation : Struct
account_id Identifier
reason RevocationReason
Processing of Data Flows
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Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
[This is a placeholder for detailed descriptions of the required
processing steps.]
Account Creation
_[To Be Specified]_
Account Modification, Enquiry, Deletion
_[To Be Specified]_
Payment Flow
Session Establishment [Customer]
The customer performs the following steps to create an
Authority:
1. Calculates PayChains, stores head, may additionally store
all or part of PayChain.
2. Creates unique authority identifier. Alternatively the
paychain root might be used for this purpose.
3. Fills remaining slots in Authority structure.
4. The authority is sent to the vendor.
Session Establishment [Vendor]
On receipt of an Authority the vendor performs the following
steps:
1. The date of the authority is checked to ensure that it is
within the vendor determined permitted timeframe.
2. The authority identifier is checked against those in the
double spending check buffer.
3. The authority identifier is added to the double spending
check buffer. [The vendor may opt to remove expired entries
from the double spending check buffer at this time].
4. If public key signatures are used
the signature of the customer certificate validated.
5. If public key signatures are used:
The signature of the authority is validated.
6. If the account certificate does not offer the required
payment guarantees or symmetric signatures are used:
A validation request is performed.
7. The Authority is appended to the online file.
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Session Establishment with Validation Request [Vendor]
If the vendor determines that an account enquiry is required an
account enquiry is created:
1. The account enquiry packet is created
2. The account enquiry is authenticated using a MAC and a
shared secret established between vendor and broker.
3. The account enquiry is sent to the broker.
Session Establishment with Validation Request [Broker]
1. A Validation Request is received.
2. The validation request is authenticated
3. The account information corresponding to the customer id is
retrieved.
4. A decision is made to accept or reject the authorization.
5. The Validation Response is sent to the Vendor
Session Establishment with Validation Request [Vendor]
On reciept of an account enquiry response a vendor:
1. Checks to see that the response is genuine.
2. Checks to see that the account is authenticated and the
required payments guarantees provided.
The Customer may then send a sequence of Paywords which are
processed as follows:
Payment Transfer [Customer]
The Customer prepares a Charge message as follows:
1. The Authority information corresponding to the vendor id is
retrieved.
2. The Payword(s) corresponding to the desired payment amount
is determined.
3. The Charge message is sent to the vendor.
Payment Transfer [Vendor]
The Vendor processes the Charge message as follows:
1. The vendor receives the charge message.
2. The session record is retrieved using the authority-id.
3. The payword is validated using the paychain root.
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4. The payword information and increment are updated in the
session record.
Collection Flow
_[To Be Specified]_
Resource and Performance Analysis
The critical features distinguishing a micropayments protocol from a
payments protocol are low latency, low processing requirements and
low storage requirements.
Latency
Processing of MPTP micropayments should not introduce noticable
delay into the user interaction of a well written application
program during normal browsing patterns.
Establishment of Payments Session
Establishment of a payment session requires one digital signature to
be generated and two signatures to be checked plus the generation of
one or more paychains. Paychain generation and part of the signature
generation may be performed offline as a background task, reducing
the latency of the interation.
Note that in many cases a sophisticated customer application program
may perform the entire process of creating an authority on a
speculative basis before the user requests a session to be
established. This carries no risk since an authority does not allow
payment unless accompanied by a valid payword and in any case the
authority would not be sent to the vendor unless a session was to be
established.
Subsequent Payments
Subsequent payments require only the generation of the next payment
token in the chain and its verification. The generation process may
be accelerated or avoided entirely through partial or complete
caching of the original paychain.
Processing
The most common processing operation are those connected with the
payments dataflow itself.
Customer
The customer bears the most substantial processing costs.
Establishment requires the creation of a paychain and digital
signature. Offline signature techniques and pre-calculation of
pay-word chains may often be performed as background tasks while the
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processor is idle.
Vendor
The vendor must process two signature verifications per
establishment of a payment session and one hash operation per
payword transferred, two if double chains are employed.
Hash chain and signature calculations would normally be calculated
inline. Use of signature screening might be combined with signature
verification to control the inline/offline calculation load.
Broker
The broker must perform one signature verification per collection,
plus one hash calculation per payword transferred. It may be
possible for a broker to perform probabilistic checking of
collection operations, checking only ten percent of a vendors
collection request.
All broker calculations may be performed offline.
Storage
Many proposed micropayment schemes offer low processing overhead but
require large quantities of data to be kept online for rapid access.
Where the frequency of incomming requests is high online access
cannot be satisfactorily provided by secondary storage such as disks
since head contention becomes the limiting factor. Online storage
requirements are thus effectively RAM storage requirements.
Offline storage requirements are unlikely to be a significant factor
in the economics of a payments scheme. Many existing servers handle
a heavy load of incoming requests while keeping comprehensive log
files.
Customer
The customer must track each open session. It may in addition be
desirable to store the computed paychains in complete or partial
form.
Vendor
The vendor must maintain an online record for each open session.
This record is fixed in length consisting of the authority
identifier and payer identifier from the authority, and the paychain
root or most recent valid pay-word plus the currency unit.
Prevention of double spending requires the maintenance by the vendor
of an online record of all payment sessions established within the
timestamp validity window. Note however that it may be desirable to
place loose limits on validity windows to permit use of speculative
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calculation of authorities.
A server satisfying 100,000 micropayment operations per hour of
which 10% are session establishment requests would require only 8Mb
of online storage for both recording of current sessions and
maintenance of the double spending prevention window. Such a server
would generate $1000 per hour at a cent per transaction which would
be more than enough at present prices to meet the cost of the
memory.
Broker
If the symmetric signature option is not provided the broker may
perform almost all operations offline in batch. Incoming collection
requests from vendors may be pre-processed to optimize access to
secondary storage such as disk. Detection of double spending
requires a record of all transactions to be available at the time
when a record is added. This need not involve the expense of online
memory however.
One way round the double spending problem is to give each vendor a
counter which must be incremented at each step. It is then only
necessary to keep one online storage location per account. Note
however that it is undesirable that this token be advertised to the
customer since it would reveal the number of purchase requests made
to that vendor. Another problem would be enforcing the serialization
of the tokens, what would happen if one customer terminated a
session much later than one started after it? This would seem to
imply that the serialization option would require rapid redemption
of the tokens which is itself undesirable.
If the symmetric signature option is provided the registry of shared
secrets must be available in primary storage. In most practical
schemes this will require the data to be stored in RAM.
Commentary and Further Work
This proposal is considered incomplete and comments are invited. A
number of additional considerations which might be explored are
noted below.
Benchmarks and statistics
It would be useful to have timings for the various processes
involved and more comprehensive estimates of relative costs.
Detailed statistics concerning customer browsing patterns would be
an advantage. How frequently does a customer change site, what
proportion of one off purchases does a customer make?
Risk factors
Statements concerning the relative importance of various risk
factors to potential customers, vendors and brokers would be of
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Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
assistance.
Inter-Broker Settlement Model
The protocol described requires perfect trust between servers acting
as brokers. Compromise of one server compromises all others. The
provisions allowing for multiple servers are not designed to permit
multiple brokers competing brokers to participate within a single
payment system.
In a large scale use more than one organization would offer broker
services but payment transfer should be possible nevertheless even
if the parties did not have a common broker. Each transaction may
thus involve two brokers, in credit card terminology an acquiring
(vendor appointed) bank and issuing (customer appointed) bank. In
addition the services of a clearing house may also be required. Such
a provision is probably essential to the long term acceptability of
a scheme.
The chief difficulty in extending the scheme concerns the
establishing to what trust relationships may be assumed between
brokers and to what degree enforcement mechanisms must be provided
for. If brokers are able to establish a high degree of trust the
impact upon the protocol is small. If brokers are unable to
establish such trust the impact might be large.
As an example of a nave Inter-Broker settlement scheme let us
consider extending the certification hierarchy to include one or
more broker certification authorities. We assume that inter-broker
settlement takes place either through direct exchange of payment
orders or employs the services of a clearing house. The only direct
impact of these changes as far as the customer and vendor are
concerned is the need to authenticate the broker certificate.
The impact on the broker trust relationship is more complex. In
particular a customer's broker has the opportunity to commit fraud
with negligible probability of detection. On receipt of a payment
instruction a customer broker might deduct the amount from the
customer's account but report it as bad credit to the vendor's
broker.
A more subtle problem concerns the trust relationships between the
vendor and the vendor's broker. In the credit card system this
relationship is transparent. The identity of the vendor's broker is
not revealed either to the customer or even the customer's broker.
While this is a significant disadvantage for a scheme intended to
use the credit card charging infrastructure as previously noted this
need not be the case.
Many of the trust and information sharing issues connected with the
introduction of inter-broker settlement may be rendered moot by the
nature of the initial acceptance community. In particular the
question of which party bears what risk is central to this issue. It
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker Page 25
Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
is therefore premature to make a detailed proposal concerning this
issue.
Wider Application
MPTP is a general resource management protocol. It might also be
used for control of resources such as printer pages [Hallam-Baker
95b], CPU time and similar low unit cost items within an
institution. MPTP might also be applied to provide resource
constraint enforcement in applications such as interactive
multi-player games (e.g. MUDs, MOOs). [Hallam-Baker95a]
Another potential application area is authorization. MPTP might be
used to establish generalised and decentralized authorization in a
distributed environment in a similar manner to Kerberos.
Security Considerations
This whole document is about security
Patent Rights
A number of companies sell patent rights to public key technology.
The legal status of a number of these patents is currently disputed.
Until then the standard IETF spiel with a revision to the PKP bit
will appear here. Reports have also surfaced that the CAFE
consortium may have a patent covering certain uses of S/Key
technology with respect to payments applications.
References.
[AccreditedSC93a] _Working Draft: American National Standard
X9.30-1993: Public Key Cryptography Using Irreversible Algorithms
for the Financial Services Industry: Part 2: The Secure Hash
Algorithm (SHA)_ Accredited Standards Committee X9 1993,
[BellareEt95]
_Internet Keyed Payment Protocols (iKP)_ Mihir Bellare, Juan A.
Garay, Ralf Hauser, Amir Herzberg, Hugo Krawczyk, Michael
Steiner, Gene Tsudik, Michael Waidner: In Proceedings of the
First USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce, New York, July
1995
[ElGamal85]
_A Public Key Cryptosystem and a Signature Scheme Based on
Discrete Logarithms_. T. El Gamal. IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory,
Vol.31, 1985, pages 469--472
[EvenGoMi90]
_Online/offline digital signatures._ S. Even, O. Goldreich and
Silvio Micali. CRYPTO 89, pages 263-277. Springer-Verlag, 1990,
Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 435.
[Haler94]
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker Page 26
Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
_The S/Key One-Time password system._. N. M. Haller, In ISOC
1994
[Hallam-Baker95]
_Electronic Payment Schemes_. P. M. Hallam-Baker.
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Payments/roadmap.html
[Hallam-Baker95a]
_Multi User Dungeons_ P. M. Hallam-Baker
[Hallam-Baker95b]
_Why Printing Should be via The Web_ P. M. Hallam-Baker
[Lamport81]
_Password Authentication with Insecure Communication_ L.
Lamport, Communications of the ACM Nov 1981 pages 770-771.
[Manasse95]
_Millicent (electronic microcommerce) _ Mark S. Manasse. 1995.
[NIST91]
_Digital Signature Standard (DSS)_ National Institute for
Standards and Technology Federal Register, vol 56 No. 169 August
1991.
[Pedersen9?]Technical report? Torben Pedersen, DAIMI, Aarhus
[Rabin79]
_Digital Signatures and Public Key Functions as Intractable as
Factorization"_. M. O. Rabin. MIT Laboratory for Computer
Science Technocal Report, MIT/LCS/TR-212 Jan 1979.
[Rivest92c]
_RFC 1321, The {MD5} Message-Digest Algorithm_ R. L. Rivest,
Internet Request for Comments, April 1992
[RivestSh95]
_PayWord and MicroMint--Two Simple Micropayment Schemes, R.L.
Rivest and A. Shamir. (To Appear.) _
[RivestShAd78]
_A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key
Cryptosystems_ R. L. Rivest, A. Shamir and L. M. Adleman. CACM,
Feb 1978 p 120-126.
[Schneier96]
_Applied Cryptography (Second Edition)_. Bruce Schneier, John
Wiley & Sons 1996.
[Shamir95]
_Fast Signature screening_. CRYPTO'95 rump session talk. to
appear in RSA Laboratories _Cryptobytes_.
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker Page 27
Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
[SteinStBoRo94]
_The Green Commerce Model_ L. H. Stein, E. A. Stefferud, N. S.
Borenstein and M. T. Rose, Internet Draft. October, 1994, Work
in Progress.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir for their suggestion to
use a chained hash function. The help and advice of Rohit Khare,
Dave Ragget, Jim Gettys and Mark Manasse were of great assistance in
producing this proposal.
Contact
The author may be contacted via email at hallam@w3.org
To Do List
* Check over symmetric key mode
* Firm up language, inline/offline poorly explained, establishment
of payment session etc. Label each term introduced and check for
definition. [would not a tool for this be nice]
* Message id business is poorly explained.
* Should firm up the collection loop semantics. It is not
absolutely essential that payments be collected only once. If
the server can check against double spending could allow partial
and incremental collection
* Consider leakage of data to various parties.
* Protection against double spending by customer currently
requires each vendor to maintain an online check of all previous
payments by the customer. This is weak protection and could be
firmed up substantially.
* Include a challenge response loop to initiate the establishment
instruction, thus ensuring that double spending cannot take
place?
* Response messages by the broker should be considered somewhat.
* Consider the specific case of payment for software on an hourly
basis in detail.
* The issue of maintenance of blacklists by individual merchants
requires special attention.
* Should there be a reputation mechanism built into the system so
that poor payers suffer a declining credit rating which is
advertised in their certificate?
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker Page 28
Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP) Version 1.0
* Need to consider the issue of account enquiries. There should be
a mechanism whereby a client can rapidly ascertain that the
broker account is correct, establish which funds are cleared
etc.
* Should there be a validity interval for payments built into each
payment order (cash by date) built into each authority?
* Should there be a do not pay before date in a payment authority?
* Additional references: Kerberos, HTTP, SMTP, MIME.
Expires May 27th 1996
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker Page 29
