Untraceable Electronic Cash

Tejaswi Vykuntam
Privacy concerns with traditional payments
Privacy concerns with traditional payments
Fraud and counterfeiting
David Chaum – untraceable money
Untraceable money with math

Alice Bob Bank

 Untraceable money with math
Using RSA algorithm and a one-way function f, one can
generate a virtual “coin” that they can pay other people
with.
3 1
1. Alice chooses a random pair(x, r) and supplies the
bank with B = r3 . f(x) mod(n)
2 2. Bank returns third root of B: r . f(x) 1/3 mod(n) and
6 withdraws one dollar from her account.
4
3. Alice extracts coin C = f(x) 1/3 mod(n) from B
4. To pay Bob one dollar, Alice provides him with the
pair (x, f(x) 1/3 mod(n))
5 5. Bob verifies with the bank that the generated coin C
has not already been deposited.
6. Bank adds the coin information to a ledger to keep
track of future repetitions.
Pros and cons
Pros:
• Sender info is private.
• Receiver must verify with the bank for each transaction thus
preventing fraud.
Cons:
• Sender info is only hidden until reuse of a transaction occurs.
• Unconditional privacy only possible if no reuse occurs.
Untraceable coins

This section provides a method that guarantees unconditional untraceability while

allowing the bank to trace a repeat spending incident computationally.
Untraceable coins

Over to colab notebook.

Untraceable coins
Untraceable coins – detecting reuse
Untraceable coins – detecting reuse

• Let us suppose that Alice is trying to use a coin C twice, with two different shopkeepers.
• Two shopkeepers generate two different binary strings.
• Suppose ‘10101101’ and ‘10110100’ are the strings generated.
• For each matching bit in the two strings, the bank will have records of a[i] and a[i] Ꚛ (u || (v+i)).
• Bank can isolate ‘u’ and trace the payment to Alice’s account.