Maintaining the validity of digital signatures in B2B applications

Abstract

Electronic transactions with commercial values between two business parties may want to be legally bound. Digital signature is an important security mechanism to provide evidence regarding the status of a transaction. However, evidence solely based on digital signatures may not enforce strong non-repudiation. Additional mechanisms are required to make digital signatures as valid non-repudiation evidence in the settlement of possible disputes. The conventional approach is to invoke a time-stamping service from a trusted third party. But it may become hard to deploy B2B applications in which no on-line third party is involved. In this paper, we present an efficient mechanism for maintaining the validity of digital signatures in direct B2B applications without the involvement of a trusted third party.