EQRC: A secure QR code-based E-coupon framework supporting online and offline transactions

In recent years, with the rapid development and popularization of e-commerce, the applications of e-coupons have become a market trend. As a typical bar code technique, QR codes can be well adopted in e-coupon-based payment services. However, there are many security threats to QR codes, including the QR code tempering, forgery, privacy information leakage and so on. To address these security problems for real situations, in this paper, we introduce a novel fragment coding-based approach for QR codes using the idea of visual cryptography. Then, we propose a QR code scheme with high security by combining the fragment coding with the commitment technique. Finally, an enhanced QR code-based secure e-coupon transaction framework is presented, which has a triple-verification feature and supports both online and offline scenarios. The following properties are provided: high information confidentiality, difficult to tamper with and forge, and the ability to resist against collusion attacks. Furthermore, the performance evaluation of computing and communication overhead is given to show the efficiency of the proposed framework.