A Mobile Telephone Based, Secure Micro-Payment Technology Using The Existing ICT Infrastructure

Abstract

The need to use mobile telephones and PDA’s as electronic-payment devices became stronger as the global mobile penetration rate reached 17 percent. However, due to the technological limitations and security considerations, the well established jargon of electronic-payment could not be employed in mobile-payment (m-payment), specifically for payment of very low amounts (e.g. micro-payment). Therefore, new technologies are needed for enabling m-payment. In this paper, we investigate the shortcomings of the available card-based micro-payment schemes and propose a new scheme that is suitable to apply to multiple-vendors for m-payment. The proposed scheme uses a Variable Transaction Number (VTN) used per purchase,in the form of an on-screen barcode, readable by the CCD barcode scanners. The proposed method satisfies requirements of micro-payment systems in terms of financial, hnological,computational and managerial costs.