Abuse-free optimistic contract signing

Abstract

We introduce the notion of abuse-free distributed contract signing, that is, distributed contract signing in which no party ever can prove to a third party that he is capable of choosing whether to validate or invalidate the contract. Assume Alice and Bob are signing a contract. If the contract protocol they use is not abuse-free, then it is possible for one party, say Alice, at some point to convince a third party, Val, that Bob is committed to the contract, whereas she is not yet. Contract protocols with this property are therefore not favorable to Bob, as there is a risk that Alice does not really want to sign the contract with him, but only use his willingness to sign to get leverage for another contract. Most existing optimistic contract signing schemes are not abuse-free. (The only optimistic contract signing scheme to date that does not have this property is inefficient, and is only abuse-free against an off-line attacker.) We give an efficient abuse-free optimistic contract-signing protocol based on ideas introduced for designated verifier proofs (i.e., proofs for which only a designated verifier can be convinced). Our basic solution is for two parties. We show that straightforward extensions to n> 2 party contracts do not work, and then show how to construct a three-party abuse-free optimistic contract-signing protocol. An important technique we introduce is a type of signature we call a private contract signature. Roughly, these are designated verifier signatures that can be converted into universally-verifiable signatures by either the signing party or a trusted third party appointed by the signing party, whose identity and power to convert can be verified (without interaction) by the party who is the designated verifier.