Building blocks for atomicity in electronic commerce
Jiawen Su, J. D. Tygar · 1996
Atomicity is clearly a central problem for electronic commerce protocols --- we can not tolerate electronic commerce systems where money is arbitrarily created or destroyed. Moreover, these atomicity properties should be retained in the event of component failures in distributed systems. In this paper, we enumerate several classes of atomic protocols. We then give two fundamental building blocks for buildingatomic electronic commerce protocols: encryption-based atomicity and authority-based atomicity. We then illustrate these building blocks by considering variations of payment-server based protocols that use these different building blocks. The results give a contrast to the class of protocols that we have previously examined in our work with NetBill. 1 Introduction We study electronic commerce protocols that allow users or agents to transfer funds on a network. In these electronic commerce protocols, a customer C makes a purchase by transferring funds to a merchant M. What if comm...