NCash - an experimental digital cash system
This corner of the WWW is devoted to information, documentation and
source for the NCash digital cash experiment. Some pointers here are
links right into my source tree, so don't be surprised if you find
inconsistencies or bugs.
Introduction
NCash is my Master's project at the Linköping Institute of Technology.
The idea is to design and implement an bare-bones off-line digital
cash system, meeting rather high standards for security and privacy.
And then try it out in the Real World. For simplicity, NCash will be
software only, with both servers and clients running on Unix-like
machines.
The cash system being implemented follows the ideas of Stefan Brands' rather closely, in
particular the system described in his 'An efficient
off-line electronic cash system based on the representation
problem'.
Background material
An excellent introduction to digital cash and related matters are David
Chaum's articles 'Achieving
Electronic Privacy' and 'Security Without
Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete',
written 1992 and 1985 respectively.
NCash mailing list
I'm running a mailing list for discussion of the NCash project. The
list is mainly for the persons more or less involved in the project,
i.e. me, my supervisor, other people who have offered help, volunteers who
wish to try out the system when time comes, and some friends and other
interested people. The main language on the list is Swedish.
To subscribe, send mail to <ncash-request@lysator.liu.se>.
The list address is <ncash-request@lysator.liu.se>.
There's also an archive.
Source and documentation
As the design and implementation proceeds, I try to keep up with
documenting NCash. If you dare, look at the latest snapshot as of January 1998. Also
available as postscript
The source code will mostly be written in the Pike language, and will probably
be released under the GNU General Public
License, but it's not ready yet for some time.
The server will probably run on a Linux machine that the mathematics department has kindly given
me access to.
Last modified: August 2004
Niels Möller
<nisse@lysator.liu.se>