Design, implementation, and performance analysis of a secure payment protocol in a payment gateway centric model

Many mobile payment systems have emerged in the last few years which allow payments for services and goods from mobile devices. However, most of them have been based on a scenario where all the entities are directly connected to each other (formally called the full connectivity scenario) and do not consider those situations where the client cannot directly communicate with the merchant. We present the design and the implementation of an anonymous secure payment protocol based on the payment gateway centric scenario for mobile environments where the client cannot communicate directly with the merchant to process the payment request. Our proposed payment protocol uses symmetric-key operations because of their low computational requirements. We present a performance evaluation of the proposed payment protocol in a real environment. Performance results obtained with the implemented protocol demonstrate that our protocol achieves a small execution time (11.68 s) for a payment transaction using a mobile phone and a restricted scenario which causes only a slight increase in the number of the steps necessary to complete a payment transaction as a result of the lack of direct communication between the client and the merchant.