For progress there is no cure. ... We can specify only the human qualities required: patience, flexibility, intelligence.
Neumann, John von: Can We Survive Technology?
In my Master's Thesis first I described today's most used secure communication technologies, like SSL/TLS, S/MIME, OpenPGP then described Chaum's digital cash system. I also described the cryptography background of these protocols.
Then I introduced one new messaging and one new payment system developed in the ELTECRYPT research group, where I work. The introduced messaging system, SecMS is entirely secure, everything is protected by end-to-end encryption and integrity protection. The payment system, ePoint is novel in many different ways: the transactions are anonymous, yet the issuer can be audited by anyone. The payments are irreversible. The seller and buyers are equal, anyone can be a seller or a buyer without transaction or other fees.
In my thesis I integrated the two mentioned system, so we can process payments and handle invoices inside a secure messaging framework. But the most interesting part is that we can abolish spam for good, since in our system every participant will have to attach a little amount of money for every mail. The mail won't be presented to the receiving user otherwise. If the mail is legitimate, the user can send back the money and can put the sender on a white-list and can lower the value of receiving mail from the sender. If the mail is a spam, then the spammer has already paid the price of the attention of the receiver, so there is no legal or moral problem with that.
In the final section, I showed some other interesting usage ideas for our micro-payment framework, like paying for web pages (so the ugly flash commercials can be forgotten) or transaction fee free donation of free software projects.
Download: Hungarian PDF, Hungarian LaTeX, www.epointsystem.org
