A Flexible Approach to Secure and Fair Document Exchange

This paper presents a novel protocol for achieving secure and fair document exchange among multiparties. The protocol has the following characteristics: it employs no trusted (third) party when a majority of the parties involved behave honestly; it adopts a technique for integrity and originality verification of messages without use of either asymmetric (public key) or symmetric (conventional) encryption; and it maximises the use of hash and polynomial functions. In comparison with existing protocols, this new protocol has a number of advantages such as better flexibility and reliability. The protocol is also assessed with respect to a set of requirements such as atomicity and assurance.