Cybercash questions...

Robert A. Rosenberg hal9001 at panix.com
Sat Dec 23 01:57:15 PST 1995


At 13:39 12/22/95, David Klur wrote:

>     The fraud possibility I see is that Bob could steal Alice's encrypted
>     credit card number (by sniffing when she buys something at Charlie's
>     Internet shop).  Then, without decrypting it, he could use it (still
>     encrypted) at Don's Internet shop, and ask Don to ship the goods to
>     Bob's address.  Since Don will not decrypt Alice's card number he will
>     not know that it is not Bob's card.  Cybercash will validate Alice's
>     card, but will not know that it is really Bob who is the customer.
>     Don will ship the goods to Bob, and Alice will get a fraudulent charge
>     on her bill.
>
>     Am I missing something?

If when Alice sends her encrypted card number to Charlie, it were encrypted
with Charlie's Public Key, then the version that Bob gets is useless if
sent to Don (since it will not decrypt with Don's Secret Key into something
that when sent to Cybercash will yield Ann's CC# when decrypted with
Cybercash's Secret Key). This still leaves the data as valid for use at
Charlie unless the actual decrypt by Charlie contains more than just the
CC#, so as to flag an "replay" attempt (ie: if the sending of the CC# is in
realtime, there could be a check field in there to validate the response as
being for the current request) and reject it.








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