The alarming increase in the number of data breaching incidents from high profile companies reflects that buying goods or services from online merchants can pose a serious risk of customers' privacy and the merchants' business reputation. The conventional approach of encrypting customer data at merchant side using the merchant's secret key is no longer adequate for preserving customer privacy. An e-payment scheme that can guarantee customer authenticity while keeping the customer's sensitive details secret from the various parties involved in the online transaction is needed. We propose here an online protocol for processing e-payments that minimizes the customer's privacy as well as merchant business risks. Using a non-reusable password-based authentication approach, the proposed protocol allows consumers to purchase goods or services from an online merchant anonymously, thus achieving the ideal privacy environment in which to shop. The payment details sent to a merchant will become obsolete after the first use, thereby preventing any subsequent fraudulent transactions by a third party. Such protocol can be easily deployed in an e-commerce environment to strengthen the integrity of the electronic payment system.
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