A new dependable exchange protocol

As electronic transaction becomes common practice in real-world business, its dependability develops into a major concern, especially in critical transactions, e.g., electronic payment and electronic contract signing. Many recent fair-exchange protocols can recover the transaction from network failures; however, few can survive local system failures. In this paper, we propose a new Dependable Exchange Protocol. With proper convertible signature scheme and message logging method, the exchange protocol provides a recovery method for network and local system failures. To the best of our knowledge, this protocol is the first fault-tolerant exchange protocol in the context of offline TTP and asynchronous channels. 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.