Fair Exchange

Fairness is a broad concept, covering a range of qualifications such as impartiality, courtesy, equity, sportsmanship, etc. Here, we focus on fairness in exchanging (electronic) goods, stipulating that none of the partners can take an undue advantage over the other. When is an interaction between two or more people called fair? Let us proceed with a few examples which reflect fairness as it is understood in the security literature. Our examples, as the cryptographic tradition goes, are scenarios involving Alice and Bob. To learn more about these people see [Gor05].