Analysis of the periodical payment framework using restricted proxy certificates

This paper discusses the design and implementation of a payment framework that is loosely based on the direct debit payment model. We define such payments as one in which customers can authorise merchants to bill them repeatedly for the provision of some service without further interaction with the customers being required. This paper aims to present a first working prototype of our periodical payment model, and to discuss its performance. Our model uses a novel approach for implementing security by employing X.509 restricted proxy certificates over Secure Socket Layer (SSL) to provide authentication, authorisation and non-repudiation services. Although the concept of electronic payments is hardly new and there is a significant amount of interest in improving its security model, most notably from Visa and MasterCard, periodical payments have been consistently overlooked by these industry heavyweights. As of now this concept remains unexplored and the current approaches for securing electronic transactions make it impossible to accommodate this transaction format. The work presented in this paper attempts to fill this niche by developing a new payment specification and a fully working prototype implementation addressing this issue.