A Fair-exchange E-commerce Protocol with Automated Dispute Resolution

In this paper, we present a fair-exchange electronic commerce (e-commerce) protocol, based on using an online trusted third party, that ensures fairness and prevents any party from gaining advantage by quitting prematurely from the transaction or otherwise misbehaving. An important contribution of this protocol is that the dispute resolution is taken care of within the protocol itself and does not require manual intervention. Thus even if one of the parties disappear after the transaction completion, the other party does not suffer in any manner. Another noteworthy contribution is that the protocol allows the customer to verify that the product he is about to receive is the one he actually ordered, before the customer pays for the product. At the same time it ensures that the customer receives the product if and only if the merchant gets paid for the product. All these features are achieved without significantly increasing the communication overhead or interactions with the third party as compared with similar protocols.