A Juridical Validation of a Contract Signing Protocol

Electronic contracting is an essential service to develop electronic commerce. But this service is not very used because merchants and consumers do not trust in contracting by electronic means. For time we already have technical solutions that should allow to give trust to the actors implied in this new scenario. But the lack of international standards and of an appropriate juridical mark, suppose a serious restraint to the contracting by electronic means. Well then, in recent years we can observe some legislative initiatives in the European Union to give full juridical effect to electronic contracting. With these two elements already in course, we believe that a last step will be necessary: to assess the adaptation of the technical solutions regarding the enacted legislation. In this paper, juridical and technical analysis of contract signing protocols is carried out. Besides, we present a modified version of a previous optimistic fair protocol for contract signing.