A lightweight and private mobile payment protocol by using mobile network operator

Mobile commerce is undoubtedly become an omnipresent and active area in electronic payments. It allows mobile user to purchase things, pay bills or make a bet via mobile phone when on the move, anywhere and at any time. Unfortunately, several challenges in accountability and privacy properties have emerged with the widespread of in-commerce in recent years. Consequently, many public-key cryptography based mobile payment protocol have been proposed. However, limited capabilities of mobile devices and wireless networks make these protocols are not suitable for mobile network. In this paper, we propose a secure mobile payment protocol which involves mobile network operators (MNO) by employing symmetric key operations. The symmetric cryptographic technique applied to our proposed protocol not only minimizes the computational operations and communication passes between the involved parties, but also has achieves a completely privacy protection for the payer and satisfies all the criteria of end-to-end security property and party's requirement including non-repudiation. The future work will concentrate on improving the verification solution to support mobile user authentication and authorization for mobile payment transactions.