A Secure E-Coupon Service Based on Blockchain Systems

As the popularity of e-commerce grows, an electronic coupon (e-coupon) is widely used due to its convenience and portability. In most e-coupon services, the information of e-coupons is managed on a centralized server. However, e-coupon services are often vulnerable to security issues because of centralization. For example, when the e-coupon information which is stored in a centralized e-coupon server is forged, it becomes difficult to match the user and the e-coupon’s owner, and an expired e-coupon can be used repetitively (i.e., double-spending). To handle this issue, we propose a new e-coupon service by exploiting a blockchain system to improve the security of the service. To do this, we first design a server to enable the e-coupon service and communicate with the blockchain system. Second, we devise a smart contract on the blockchain system to provide integrity of the e-coupon business logic and the e-coupon’s information. We implemented the proposed service on an Ethereum-based blockchain system. The experimental results show that our proposed service improves higher security with a minor performance overhead compared with an existing e-coupon service.