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>