A Synchronous Multi-Party Contract Signing Protocol Improving Lower Bound of Steps
Jianying Zhou, Jose Antonio Onieva, Javier López · Kluwer Academic Publishers eBooks · 2006
Contract signing is a fundamental service in doing business. The Internet has facilitated the electronic commerce, and it is necessary to find appropriate mechanisms for contract signing in the digital world. A number of two-party contract signing protocols have been proposed with various features. Nevertheless, in some applications, a contract may need to be signed by multiple parties. Less research has been done on multi-party contract signing. In this paper, we propose a new synchronous multi-party contract signing protocol that, with n parties, it reaches a lower bound of 3( n − 1) steps in the all-honest case and 4 n − 2 steps in the worst case (i.e., all parties contact the trusted third party). This is so far the most efficient synchronous multi-party contract signing protocol in terms of the number of messages required. We further consider the additional features like timeliness and abuse-freeness in the improved version. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.