Contract signing is a fundamental service in doing business. The Internet has facilitated the electronic commerce, and it is necessary to find appropriate mechanisms for contract signing in the digital world. A number of two-party contract signing protocols have been proposed with various features. Nevertheless, in some applications, a contract may need to be signed by multiple parties. Less research has been done on multi-party contract signing. In this paper, we propose a new synchronous multi-party contract signing protocol that, with n parties, it reaches a lower bound of 3(n - 1) steps in the all-honest case and 4 n - 2 steps in the worst case (i.e., all parties contact the trusted third party). This is so far the most efficient synchronous multi-party contract signing protocol in terms of the number of messages required. We further consider the additional features like timeliness and abuse-freeness in the improved version. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.
CITATION STYLE
Zhou, J., Onieva, J. A., & Lopez, J. (2006). A synchronous multi-party contract signing protocol improving lower bound of steps. IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, 201, 221–232. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-33406-8_19
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