GUMP Grand Unified Meta-Protocols recipes for simple, standards-based financial cryptography

Abstract

In this paper, we present a set of simple, all-parties-authenticated application protocol frameworks appropriate for a wide variety of financial applications running on the Internet. Collectively, we call these frameworks “GUMP”, for Grand Unified Meta-Protocols. The driving goal of the design is simplicity, so as to reduce dramatically the cost of engineering and deployment of application protocols. The simplicity of GUMP follows directly from a number of business-level premises, chief of which is that the client must digitally sign all transactions.