A Secure Multicoupon Solution for Multi-merchant Scenarios

Electronic multicoupons are the equivalent of paper-based coupons booklets, offered to customers in order to achieve discounts or gifts from one or more merchants for goods or services. To date, most of the previous proposals have focused in scenarios where multiple customers can interact with a single merchant. But this restriction is a serious drawback for the expansion of the use of electronic coupons, since each customer needs a preestablished relationship with each merchant. In this paper, we propose a new multicoupon scheme for multi-merchant scenarios, preserving security properties of previous single merchant schemes, but enhancing the efficiency and the security of the few solutions that deal with multi-merchant scenarios.