Secure E-Coupons

As the Internet is getting easier and faster to use, electronic coupon (e-coupon) distribution is becoming a more and more popular advertising technique. E-coupons are the digital analogue of paper coupons which are used to provide customers with discounts or gift in order to incentive the purchase of some products. Nowadays, the potential of digital coupons has not been fully exploited on the web. This is mostly due to the lack of ldquoefficientrdquo techniques to handle the generation and distribution of e-coupons. In this paper we discuss models and protocols for e-coupons satisfying a number of security requirements. Furthermore we present a lightweight implementation of our protocol, which preserves the privacy of the users, since it does not require any registration phase