Certified mail is the fair exchange of secret data for a receipt. It is the most mature instance of fair exchange that has been standardized in [4]: the players in a certified mail system are at least one sender S and one receiver R. Depending on the protocols used and the service provided, the protocol may involve one or more trusted third parties (TTPs) T. If reliable {time stamping} is desired, additional time-stamping authorities TS may be involved, too. For evaluating the evidence produced, a verifier V can be invoked after completion of the protocol. Sending a certified mail includes several actions [4]. Each of these actions may be disputable, i.e., may later be disputed at a verifier, such as a court (see Figure 1): a sender composes a signed message (nonrepudiationof origin) and sends it to the first TTP (nonrepudiation of submission). The first TTP may send, it to additional TTPs (nonrepudiation of transport) and finally to the recipient (nonrepudiation of delivery, which...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
References
Asokan, N., Victor Shoup, and Michael Waidner (1998). “Asynchronous protocols for optimistic fair exchange.” 1998 IEEE Symposium on Research in Security and Privacy. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, 86–99.
Bao, Feng, Robert Deng, and Wenbo Mao (1998). “Efficient and practical fair exchange protocols with off-line TTP.” 1998 IEEE Symposium on Research in Security and Privacy. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, 77–85.
Blum, Manuel (1981). Three Applications of the Oblivious Transfer, Version 2. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California at Berkeley, Berkley, CA.
ISO/IEC (1997). Information Technology—Security Techniques—Nonrepudiation. Part 1: General; ISO/IEC International Standart 13888-1, (1st ed.).
Rabin, Michael O. (1981). “Transaction protection by Beacons.” Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Technical Report TR-29-81.
Rabin, Michael O. (1983). “Transaction protection by beacons.” Journal of Computer and System Sciences 27, 256–267.
Zhou, Jianying and Dieter Gollmann (1996). “A fair non-repudiation protocol.” IEEE Symposium on Research in Security and Privacy Oakland, 55–61.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 International Federation for Information Processing
About this entry
Cite this entry
Schunter, M. (2005). Certified Mail. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA . https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-23483-7_54
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-23483-7_54
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-23473-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-23483-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceReference Module Computer Science and Engineering