Systematic development of a family of fair exchange protocols

Abstract

Exchange protocols play an important role in application areas such as ecommerce 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 advantage over an honest participant by misbehaving. This paper presents a family of fair exchange protocols for two participants under a variety of assumptions concerning participant misbehaviour, node reliability and message delays. © 2004 by International Federation for Information Processing.