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 economics. This corresponds to an assumption of rational behavior of protocol participants. Making this assumption allows us to design schemes that are highly efficient in the common case - which is, when participants behave rationally. We demonstrate such a scheme for Web advertising, employing the concept of e-coupons. We prove that our proposed scheme is safe and meets our stringent security requirements. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.