Secure accounting and auditing on the Web

The majority of Internet revenues come from connectivity and advertisement fees, yet there are almost no means to secure the accounting processes which determine these fees from fraudulent behavior, e.g. a scheme to provide reliable usage information regarding a Web site. There is an enormous financial incentive for the Web site to inflate this data, and therefore measurement schemes should be secure against malicious behavior of the site. Measurement schemes which are based on sampling are relatively protected from corrupt behavior of Web sites but do not provide meaningful data about small and medium scale sites. We present schemes that measure the amount of service requested from servers by clients. The schemes are secure and efficient and provide a short proof for the metered data. Immediate applications are a secure measurement of visits to a Web site and a secure usage based accounting mechanism between networks.