Abstract
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 4n − 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.
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Zhou, J., Onieva, J.A., Lopez, J. (2006). A Synchronous Multi-Party Contract Signing Protocol Improving Lower Bound of Steps. In: Fischer-Hübner, S., Rannenberg, K., Yngström, L., Lindskog, S. (eds) Security and Privacy in Dynamic Environments. SEC 2006. IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, vol 201. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-33406-8_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-33406-8_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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