A Resilient micro-payment infrastructure: an approach based on blockchain technology

Authors

  • Soumaya Bel Hadj Youssef School of Communication Engineering (SUP'COM),University of Carthage, Tunisia
  • Noureddine Boudriga School of Communication Engineering (SUP'COM), University of Carthage, Tunisia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.48129/kjs.v49i1.10578

Keywords:

Blockchain technology, ecommerce, micropayment, recovery from cyber attacks

Abstract

Micro-payment systems are growing at a rapid pace despite their security weaknesses. Resilient micro-payment infrastructure is a critical asset to digital economy as it helps protecting transactions and extends micro shopping. In this paper, we present a micro payment infrastructure based on blockchain technology that is capable of reducing the complexity of transactions’ verification, reducing losses, and recovering from various cyber attacks. This infrastructure is user trust-aware, in the sense that it builds a trust function capable of providing a real time management of the user’s trust levels based on historic activity and then adapt the level of verification and risk of misconduct. Moreover, three different trust models are developed to provide different estimations of the tokens’ block size to be submitted to the blockchain network for verification and control of the user waiting time. The micropayment infrastructure provides different security services such as authentication, double-spending and double-selling prevention, tokens forging prevention, transaction traceability, and recovery from cyber attack. In addition, its efficiency is improved through the reduction of the verification delay and user waiting time. Finally, a numerical simulation is conducted to assess the performance of the infrastructure.

Author Biographies

Soumaya Bel Hadj Youssef, School of Communication Engineering (SUP'COM),University of Carthage, Tunisia

Soumaya Bel Hadj Youssef received her National Engineering Degree in Communications and Networks from the National Engineering School of GABES in 2008 and her Research Master Degree in Telecommunications from Higher School of Communications of Tunis (SUP’Com, Tunisia) in 2010. She is currently a PhD Student at SUP’Com.

Noureddine Boudriga, School of Communication Engineering (SUP'COM), University of Carthage, Tunisia

Pr. Noureddine Boudriga is an internationally known scientist/academic. He received his Doctorate in Algebraic Topology from University Paris XI (France) and his DSc (Doctorat d’Etat) in Computer Science from the University of Tunis (Tunisia). He is currently an Emeritus Professor of Telecommunications at the University of Carthage, Tunisia. He is an extraordinary professor at Western Cape University, South Africa. He has served as the General Director and founder of the Tunisian National Digital Certification Agency. He is the recipient of the Tunisian Presidential Award in Science and Research (2004). He is involved in a very active research in communication networks, cyber security and defense, and Optical and wireless communication. He authored and co-authored a large number of journal papers, books, and book chapters on communication networks and cyber security.

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Published

02-12-2021

Issue

Vol. 49 No. 1 (2022): Kuwait Journal of Science

Section

Computer Science