In this paper we show how to achieve timed fair exchange of digital signatures of standard type. Timed fair exchange (in particular, contract signing) has been considered before, but only for Rabin and RSA signatures of a special kind. Our construction follows the gradual release paradigm, and works on a new \time" structure that we call a mirrored time-line. Using this structure, we design a p...

In this paper, we study the solvability of fair exchange in the context of Byzantine failures. In doing so, we first present a generic model with trusted and untrusted processes, and propose a specification of the fair exchange problem that clearly separates safety and liveness, via fine-grained properties. We then show that the solvability of fair exchange depends on a necessary and sufficient...

Fair exchange between mutually distrusted parties has been recognized as an important issue in electronic commerce. Ž . Ž . However, the correctness fairness of the existing fair exchange protocols that use a Trusted Third Party TTP is based on the assumption that during an exchange there are no failures at any of the local systems involved in the exchange, which is Ž . Ž . too strong in many s...

In this paper two criteria for evaluation of power balance control performance in control areas of the UCTE interconnection are proposed: the mean value of Area Control Error (ACE) and the standard deviation of ACE. A methodology for assigning fair values of the two criteria to individual control areas is presented. This methodology ensures that the UCTE grid is operated in a safe manner and no...

We propose a tracing scheme of e-cash which has not only fair tracing ability but also lower computational complexity for comparisons. Many other protocols allow optimistic fair tracing which means that illegal tracing can be found after tracing and depositing in bank. But in this scheme, illegal tracing done by bank alone is impossible. We propose a marking mechanism based on a variant of an O...

In this paper we define a property for multi-party protocols called exclusion-freeness. In multi-party protocols respecting the strongest definition of this property, participants are sure that they will not be excluded from a protocol’s execution and, consequently, they do not have to trust each other any more. We study this property on a wellknown multi-party fair exchange protocol with an on...

Concurrent signature, introduced by Chen, Kudla and Paterson, is known to just fall short to solve the long standing fair exchange of signature problem without requiring any trusted third party (TTP). The price for not requiring any TTP is that the initial signer is always having some advantage over the matching signer in controlling whether the protocol completes or not, and hence, whether the...

This paper addresses the issue of fair (signature or key) exchange in emerging ubiquitous commerce (ucommerce). Such an application poses new security challenges. In particular, it involves distributed and autonomous operations running in a much open, dynamic and resource-diversified networking environment, which makes an exchange highly susceptible to security attacks and system failures. Exis...

A computer network serves distributed applications by communicating messages between their remote ends. Many such applications desire minimal delay for their messages. Beside this efficiency objective, allocation of the network capacity is also subject to the fairness constraint of not shutting off communication for any individual message. Processor Sharing (PS) is a de facto standard of fairne...

Network exchange is now widely used. However, it still cannot avoid the problems evolving from network exchange. For example. A buyer may not receive the order even if he/she makes the payment. For another example, the seller possibly get nothing even when the merchandise is sent. Some studies about the fair exchange have proposed protocols for the design of efficiency and exploited the signatu...