Secure and lightweight advertising on the Web

We consider how to obtain a safe and efficient scheme for Web advertising. We introduce to cryptography the market model, a common concept from econom ics. This corresponds to an assumption of rational behavior of protocol par ticipants. Making this assumption allows us to design schemes that are high ly efficient in the common case - which is, when participants behave ration ally. We demonstrate such a scheme for Web advertising, employing the conce pt of e-coupons. We prove that our proposed scheme is safe and meets our st ringent security requirements. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.