Importance

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Abstract

A cyber wallet in the form of stored and protected account information, which may be 'carried' on a tamper resistant portable electronic storage medium such as a smartcard, or stored on the customer's computer (or personal digital assistant, PCMCIA card, or the like) together with the browser/mosaic software, is provide to a customer for the purpose of making electronic payments from the possessor of the wallet to a merchant at a remote site on the Internet. Security of the information contained in the wallet is provided by a public key file containing public keys to be used for encrypting the payment information into an authorization ticket which is sent by the wallet to the merchant, and then forwarded to the account servicer for decryption, the decryption key being in the form or a private key held only by the account servicer, and to which the merchant and other parties have no access. The public key rile preferably contains a plurality or public keys selectable by an identifier associated with but not a part of the key itself, so that the account servicer can control, by having the merchant send an identifier to the wallet, the selection of uncompromised keys without anyone but the servicer having knowledge of which key is being selected.

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First Claim