Systematic Development of a Family of Fair Exchange Protocols

: Fair exchange protocols play an important role in application areas such as e-commerce where protocol participants require mutual guarantees that a transaction involving exchange of items has taken place in a specific manner. A protocol is fair if no protocol participant can gain any useful advantage over honest participants by misbehaving. In addition, such a protocol is fault tolerant if the protocol can ensure no loss of fairness to an honest participant despite the occurrence of failures of the assumed type. Fault tolerant fair exchange protocols have not been studied adequately. This paper remedies the situation by systematically developing a family of fair exchange protocols for two participants under a variety of assumptions concerning participant misbehaviour, message delays and node failures. The treatment presented not only shows how a non-fault tolerant version of a protocol can be made fault tolerant, but also highlights the subtle relationships that exist between fairnes...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: DBSEC
• Authors: Paul D. Ezhilchelvan, Santosh K. Shrivastava
• Keywords: DBSEC 2003, DBSEC 2007, Fair Exchange Protocols, Fault Tolerant, Protocol Participant