Abstract
A mobile coupon (m-coupon) can be presented with a smartphone for obtaining a financial discount when purchasing a product or a service. M-coupons are a powerful marketing tool that has enjoyed a huge growth and diffusion, involving tens of millions of people each year. We propose an architecture which may enable significant improvements over current m-coupon technology, in terms of acceptance of potential customers and of marketing actions that become feasible: the customer does not need to install any dedicated app; an m-coupon is not bound to any specific device or customer; an m-coupon may be redeemed at any store in a set of potentially many thousands of stores, without any prior arrangement between customer and store. We are not aware of any proposal with these properties.
Highlights
A mobile coupon (m-coupon) is a piece of data constructed and delivered electronically that can be used for a financial discount when purchasing a product or a service [1]
Complex multirow/multitable atomic transactions may be avoided because the QR code is cryptographically signed: authenticity, integrity, and temporal validity are guaranteed by the cryptographic signature on the QR code, and transactional access is required only for preventing multiple redemptions of the same m-coupon
Though, authenticity, integrity, and single spendability may be guaranteed : a QR code may contain just a short code to be checked against a database locally available to the scanning device
Summary
A mobile coupon (m-coupon) is a piece of data constructed and delivered electronically that can be used for a financial discount when purchasing a product or a service [1]. When a customer presents an m-coupon to a merchant for redemption, the merchant must be able to ascertain that the mcoupon (a) is authentic, (b) has not been modified in any part, (c) has not been redeemed already, and (d) has not expired (m-coupons usually have an expiration date) Ensuring these properties is essential to the merchant and, more broadly, to all the actors involved in the marketing action [4]. All the m-coupon implementations that we are aware of are based on one or more of the following constraints: a given m-coupon may be redeemed only by a specific device or a specific customer; a given m-coupon may be redeemed only at a specific store, or at any store in a predefined small set of stores These requirements are usually fulfilled by forcing customers to handle m-coupons through dedicated software to be installed on their smartphones or tablets [4,5,6]. It has been recently shown that exclusive airline lounges in several airports allow access by presenting a simple QR code that can be faked [18]
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