CerTicket Solution: Safe Home-Ticketing Through Internet

The Internet has fostered new ways of commerce that facilitate consumer’s life, eliminating delays or displacements; electronic ticketing is one of them. Recently, several proposals have appeared that allow the procurement of tickets at the consumer’s home. All these methods use either barcodes or smart cards, both of which have serious drawbacks. In fact, bar codes can be easily duplicated, and to be able to write in smart cards special hardware is needed at the user’s premises. The system described in this paper solves these impediments using bar codes and smart cards jointly, in a novel way that prevents duplications without requiring additional hardware or software at the consumer’s home. The verifiers located at each venue entry point are standalone devices, and are not connected in any way neither among them nor to any central database, server or portal. Nevertheless, thanks to the novel design explained in this work, all duplicate tickets will be detected, and only the valid one (whether or not it is the first to be presented at the entrance point) will be allowed to enter.