Blind sales in electronic commerce

ABSTRACT

We start with the usual paradigm in electronic commerce: a consumer who wants to buy from a merchant. However, both parties wish to enjoy maximal privacy. In addition to remaining anonymous, the consumer wants to hide her browsing pattern and even the identification of the product she may decide to buy. Nevertheless, she wants to be able to negotiate the price, pay, receive the product and even enjoy maintenance on it. On the other hand, the merchant wants to leak as little information as possible on his catalogue for fear that he might in fact be dealing with a hostile competitor. For this purpose, we introduce the Blind Customer Buying Behaviour model, which adds confidentiality to the standard Customer Buying Behaviour model. In this paper, we concentrate on blind catalogue browsing.

REFERENCES

• 1: William Aiello , Yuval Ishai , Omer Reingold, Priced Oblivious Transfer: How to Sell Digital Goods, Proceedings of the International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptographic Techniques: Advances in Cryptology, p.119-135, May 06-10, 2001
• 2: D. Asonov and J.-C. Freytag, "Almost optimal private information retrieval", Technical report HUB-IB-156, Humboldt University, Berlin, 2001.
• 3: Feng Bao , Robert H. Deng , Peirong Feng, An Efficient and Practical Scheme for Privacy Protection in the E-Commerce of Digital Goods, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology, p.162-170, December 08-09, 2000
• 4: D. Beaver, J. Feigenbaum, J. Kilian and P. Rogaway, "Locally random reductions: Improvements and applications", Journal of Cryptology 10(1):17--36, 1997.
• 5: F. Boudot, "Efficient proofs that a committed number lies in an interval", Advances in Cryptology: Proceedings of Eurocrypt 00, pages 431--444, Springer-Verlag, 2000.
• 6: Gilles Brassard , Claude Crépeau , Jean-Marc Robert, All-or-nothing disclosure of secrets, Proceedings on Advances in cryptology---CRYPTO '86, p.234-238, January 1987, Santa Barbara, California, United States
• 7: C. Cachin, S. Micali and M. Stadler, "Computationally private information retrieval with polylogarithmic communication", Advances in Cryptology: Proceedings of Eurocrypt 99, pages 402--414, Springer-Verlag, 1999.
• 8: Y.-C. Chang, "Single database private information retrieval with logarithmic communication", Available at URL: http://eprint.iacr.org/2004/036/, 2004.
• 9: David L. Chaum, Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms, Communications of the ACM, v.24 n.2, p.84-90, Feb. 1981 [doi>10.1145/358549.358563]
• 10: David Chaum, Security without identification: transaction systems to make big brother obsolete, Communications of the ACM, v.28 n.10, p.1030-1044, Oct. 1985 [doi>10.1145/4372.4373]
• 11: Benny Chor , Niv Gilboa, Computationally private information retrieval (extended abstract), Proceedings of the twenty-ninth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing, p.304-313, May 04-06, 1997, El Paso, Texas, United States [doi>10.1145/258533.258609]
• 12: B. Chor , O. Goldreich , E. Kushilevitz , M. Sudan, Private information retrieval, Proceedings of the 36th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS'95), p.41, October 23-25, 1995
• 13: R. Clarke, Fundamentals of negotiation. URL:www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/SOS/FundasNeg.html, 1993, accessed 8 September 2004.
• 14: Claude Crépeau, Equivalence Between Two Flavours of Oblivious Transfers, A Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques on Advances in Cryptology, p.350-354, August 16-20, 1987
• 15: W. Diffle and M. E. Hellman, "New directions in cryptography", IEEE Transactions on Information Theory22(6):644--654, October 1976.
• 16: T. ElGamal, "A public key cryptosystem and a signature scheme based on discrete logarithms", IEEE Transactions on Information Theory31:469--472, 1985.
• 17: Shimon Even , Oded Goldreich , Abraham Lempel, A randomized protocol for signing contracts, Communications of the ACM, v.28 n.6, p.637-647, June 1985 [doi>10.1145/3812.3818]
• 18: Yael Gertner , Yuval Ishai , Eyal Kushilevitz , Tal Malkin, Protecting data privacy in private information retrieval schemes, Proceedings of the thirtieth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing, p.151-160, May 24-26, 1998, Dallas, Texas, United States [doi>10.1145/276698.276723]
• 19: Guardster, Ltd., "Anonymous web surfing", URL: www.guardster.com, accessed 8 September 2004.
• 20: Robert H. Guttman , Alexandros G. Moukas , Pattie Maes, Agent-mediated electronic commerce: a survey, The Knowledge Engineering Review, v.13 n.2, p.147-159, July 1998 [doi>10.1017/S0269888998002082]
• 21: Joe Kilian, Founding crytpography on oblivious transfer, Proceedings of the twentieth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing, p.20-31, May 02-04, 1988, Chicago, Illinois, United States [doi>10.1145/62212.62215]
• 22: E. Kushilevitz , R. Ostrovsky, Replication is not needed: single database, computationally-private information retrieval, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS '97), p.364, October 19-22, 1997
• 23: E. Kushilevitz and R. Ostrovsky, "One-way trapdoor permutations are sufficient for single-server private information retrieval", Technical report CS0962, Computer Science Department, Technion, 1999.
• 24: H. Lipmaa, "Computationally private information retrieval with quasilogarithmic total communication", Available at URL: http://eprint.iacr.org/2004/063/, 2004.
• 25: Tal Geula Malkin , Shafi Goldwasser, A study of secure database access and general two-party computation, 2000
• 26: Ueli M. Maurer , Stefan Wolf, The Relationship Between Breaking the Diffie--Hellman Protocol and Computing Discrete Logarithms, SIAM Journal on Computing, v.28 n.5, p.1689-1721, April/May 1999 [doi>10.1137/S0097539796302749]
• 27: Ralph C. Merkle, Secure communications over insecure channels, Communications of the ACM, v.21 n.4, p.294-299, April 1978 [doi>10.1145/359460.359473]
• 28: Moni Naor , Benny Pinkas, Oblivious transfer and polynomial evaluation, Proceedings of the thirty-first annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing, p.245-254, May 01-04, 1999, Atlanta, Georgia, United States [doi>10.1145/301250.301312]
• 29: Moni Naor , Benny Pinkas, Oblivious Transfer with Adaptive Queries, Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Cryptology Conference on Advances in Cryptology, p.573-590, August 15-19, 1999
• 30: Moni Naor , Benny Pinkas, Efficient oblivious transfer protocols, Proceedings of the twelfth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms, p.448-457, January 07-09, 2001, Washington, D.C., United States
• 31: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, "Universal Declaration of Human Rights", URL: http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm, accessed 8 September 2004.
• 32: Rafail Ostrovsky , Victor Shoup, Private information storage (extended abstract), Proceedings of the twenty-ninth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing, p.294-303, May 04-06, 1997, El Paso, Texas, United States [doi>10.1145/258533.258606]
• 33: M. Rabin, "How to exchange secrets by oblivious transfer", Technical memo TR-81, Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard University, 1981.
• 34: Claus-Peter Schnorr , Markus Jakobsson, Security of Signed ElGamal Encryption, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security: Advances in Cryptology, p.73-89, December 03-07, 2000
• 35: S. W. Smith , D. Safford, Practical server privacy with secure coprocessors, IBM Systems Journal, v.40 n.3, p.683-695, March 2001
• 36: Douglas R. Stinson, Cryptography: Theory and Practice, CRC Press, Inc., Boca Raton, FL, 1995
• 37: Christian Tobias, Practical Oblivious Transfer Protocols, Revised Papers from the 5th International Workshop on Information Hiding, p.415-426, October 07-09, 2002
• 38: Network-Tools.com, Tools to trace a user, URL: www.Network-Tools.com, accessed 8 September 2004.
• 39: Efraim Turban , Jae Lee , David King , H. Michael Chung, Electronic commerce: a managerial perspective, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2000
• 40: L. von Ahn, M. Blum, N. J. Hopper and J. Langford, "Captcha: Telling humans and computers apart", Advances in Cryptology: Proceedings of Eurocrypt 03, pages 294--311, Springer-Verlag, 2003.
• 41: Stephen Wiesner, Conjugate coding, ACM SIGACT News, v.15 n.1, p.78-88, Winter-Spring 1983 [doi>10.1145/1008908.1008920]
• 42: A.C.-C. Yao, "Protocols for secure computation", Proceedings of 23rd IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, pages 160--164, 1982.
• 43: A.C.-C. Yao, "How to generate and exchange secrets", Proceedings of 27th IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, pages 162--167, 1986.

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
CAPTCHA, anonymous surfing, cryptography, customer buying behaviour, electronic commerce, oblivious transfer, private information retrieval