Generic, Optimistic, and Efficient Schemes for Fair Certified Email Delivery

As a value-added service for standard email systems, a certified email scheme allows a sender to deliver a message to a receiver in a fair way in the sense that either the sender obtains a receipt from the receiver and the receiver accesses the content of the email simultaneously, or neither party gets the expected item. In this paper, we first point out some weaknesses in several existing schemes. Then, we present two generic optimistic certified email schemes with transparent TTP. Our schemes are not only fair, but also support timeliness in two flavors: one scheme supports weak timeliness but with stateless TTP, while the other guarantees (strong) timeliness though only supports weak stateless TTP. Technical discussion and comparison are provide to show that our schemes are both secure and efficient, compared with the-state-of-art in