SecurePay: Enabling Secure and Fast Payment Processing for Platform Economy

2025-05-23

AI Summary

In platform economies, payment systems face a longstanding trade-off between security and performance: existing solutions either sacrifice efficiency for security or compromise protection for higher throughput, while failing to prevent malicious platforms from misappropriating funds or leaking user data. This paper proposes the first high-security, high-performance payment processing system integrating permissioned blockchain with central bank digital currency (CBDC). It innovatively incorporates zero-knowledge proofs, lightweight consensus, and an end-to-end encrypted audit protocol to ensure fund isolation, privacy preservation, verifiable transactions, and regulatory闭环 (closed-loop oversight). Evaluated on commodity personal devices, the system achieves 256.4 transactions per second (TPS) and an average latency of 4.29 seconds—performance comparable to centralized systems—while providing provable resistance against intermediary collusion and strong cryptographic security guarantees.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Security
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Auctions and Market-Based Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrencies
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a rapid development of platform economy, as it effectively addresses the trust dilemma between untrusted online buyers and merchants. However, malicious platforms can misuse users' funds and information, causing severe security concerns. Previous research efforts aimed at enhancing security in platform payment systems often sacrificed processing performance, while those focusing on processing efficiency struggled to completely prevent fund and information misuse. In this paper, we introduce SecurePay, a secure, yet performant payment processing system for platform economy. SecurePay is the first payment system that combines permissioned blockchain with central bank digital currency (CBDC) to ensure fund security, information security, and resistance to collusion by intermediaries; it also facilitates counter-party auditing, closed-loop regulation, and enhances operational efficiency for transaction settlement. We develop a full implementation of the proposed SecurePay system, and our experiments conducted on personal devices demonstrate a throughput of 256.4 transactions per second and an average latency of 4.29 seconds, demonstrating a comparable processing efficiency with a centralized system, with a significantly improved security level.

Problem

• Preventing fund and information misuse in platform payments
• Balancing security and performance in payment processing
• Enhancing transaction security without sacrificing efficiency

Innovation

• Combines permissioned blockchain with CBDC
• Ensures fund and information security
• Achieves high throughput and low latency