A Privacy-Preserving Mobile Payment System for Mass Transit

In the near future, mobile payment systems based on smartphones are expected to be widely applied in various environments, including transit services. When passengers use mass transit, their private information, such as their identity and route, may be made available to some related organizations, such as transit agencies, financial institutions, mobile carriers, and providers of smart cards, among others, even when the passengers may not want their information to be revealed. To protect passenger privacy, this paper proposes a privacy-preserving transit payment system based on traceable signatures, identity-based signatures, and anonymous signatures. In addition to passenger privacy, the proposed system facilitates the proactive blocking of misbehaving passengers, free-transfer services (or transfer discount), and postpaid programs. We demonstrate that the performance of this system is good enough for immediate deployment based on various experiments.