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Abuse-Free Multi-party Contract Signing

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Distributed Computing (DISC 1999)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1693))

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Abstract

In the contract-signing problem, participants wish to sign a contract m in such a way that either all participants obtain each others’ signatures, or nobody does. A contract-signing protocol is optimistic if it relies on a trusted third party, but only uses it when participants misbehave (e.g., try to cheat, or simply crash).

We construct an efficient general multi-party optimistic contract-singing protocol. The protocol is also abuse-free, meaning that at no point can a participant prove to others that he is capable of choosing whether to validate or invalidate the contract. This is the first abuse-free optimistic contract-signing protocol that has been developed for n > 3 parties. We also show a linear lower bound on the number of rounds of any n-party optimistic contract-signing protocol.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bell Laboratories, Information Sciences Research Center, 600 Mountain Ave, Murray Hill, NJ, 07974, USA

    Juan A. Garay & Philip MacKenzie

Authors
  1. Juan A. Garay
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  2. Philip MacKenzie
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department for Computer Science 6211 Sudikoff Laboratory for Computer Science, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 03755, USA

    Prasad Jayanti

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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Garay, J.A., MacKenzie, P. (1999). Abuse-Free Multi-party Contract Signing. In: Jayanti, P. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1693. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48169-9_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48169-9_11

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-66531-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48169-0

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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