Secure Payment System Utilizing MANET for Disaster Areas

Mobile payment system in a disaster area have the potential to provide electronic transactions for people purchasing recovery goods like foodstuffs, clothes, and medicine. Conversely, to enable transactions in a disaster area, current payment systems need communication infrastructures (such as wired networks and cellular networks) which may be ruined during such disasters as large-scale earthquakes and flooding and thus cannot be depended on in a disaster area. In this paper, we introduce a new mobile payment system utilizing infrastructureless mobile adhoc networks to enable transactions that permit users to shop in disaster areas. Specifically, we introduce an endorsement-based mechanism to provide payment guarantees for a customer-to-merchant transaction and a multilevel endorsement (MLE) mechanism with a lightweight scheme based on Bloom filter and Merkle tree to reduce communication overheads. Our mobile payment system achieves secure transaction by adopting various schemes such as location-based mutual monitoring scheme and blind signature, while our newly introduced event chain mechanism prevents double spending attacks. As validated by simulations, the proposed mobile payment system is useful in a disaster area, achieving high transaction completion ratio, 65%-90% for all scenario tested, and is storage-efficient for mobile devices with an overall average of 7 MB merchant message size.