A Survey on Optimistic Fair Digital Signature Exchange Protocols

Security services become crucial to many applications such as e-commerce payment protocols, electronic contract signing, and certified e-mail delivery, with the phenomenal growth of the Internet and open networks. For these applications fair exchange must be assured. A fair protocol allows two parties to exchange digital signatures over the Internet in a fair way, so that either each party gets the other’s signature, or neither party does. This paper, gives a survey on the most important fair and optimistic digital signature exchange protocols. Optimistic, means the third trusted party (TTP) is involved only in the situations where one party is cheating or the communication channel is interrupted, i.e., TTP is offline. As more business is conducted over the Internet, the fair-exchange problem is gaining greater importance. This paper also provides an analysis of basic features, security, and efficiency of digital signature exchange protocols. Keywords-Fair-exchange protocols; e-commerce; digital signatures; security.