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Contract Signing

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security

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Synonyms

Nonrepudiable agreement

Related Concepts

Certified Mail; Fair Exchange; Nonrepudiation

Definition

A contract is a nonrepudiable agreement on a given contract text, can be used to prove agreement between the signatories to any verifier.

Background

Early contract signing protocols were either based on an in-line Trusted Third Party [8], gradual exchange of secrets [5], or gradual increase of privilege [ 3].

Theory

A contract signing scheme [4] is used to fairly compute a contract such that, even if one of the signatories misbehaves, either both or none of the signatories obtain a contract. Contract signing generalizes fair exchange of signatures: a contract signing protocol does not need to output signatures but can define its own format instead. Contract signing can be categorized by the properties of fair exchange (like abuse freeness) as well as the properties of the nonrepudiation tokens it produces (like third-party time stampingof the contract). Unlike agreement...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Asokan N, Shoup V, Waidner M (1988) Optimistic fair exchange of digital signatures. In: Nyberg K (ed) Advances in cryptology – EUROCRYPT’98. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 1403. Springer, Berlin, pp 591–606

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  2. Baum-Waidner B, Waidner M (2000) Round-optimal and abuse-free optimistic multi-party contract signing. In: Montanari U, Rolim JDP, Welzl E (eds) 27th international colloquium on automata, languages and programming (ICALP). Lecture notes in computer science, vol 1853. Springer, Berlin, pp 524 ff

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  3. Ben-Or M, Goldreich O, Micali S, Rivest RL (1990) A fair protocol for signing contracts. IEEE Trans Inform Theory 36(1):40–46

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  4. Blum M (1981) Three applications of the oblivious transfer, Version 2. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California at Berkeley, Berkley

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  5. Blum M (1983) Coin flipping by telephone, a protocol for solving impossible problems. ACM SIGACT News 15(1):23–27

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  6. Even S (1983) A protocol for signing contracts. ACM SIGACT News 15(1):34–39

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  7. Pfitzmann B, Schunter M, Waidner M (1998) Optimal efficiency of optimistic contract signing. In: 17th symposium on principles of distributed computing (PODC). ACM Press, New York, pp 113–122

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  8. Rabin MO (1983) Transaction protection by beacons. J Comput Syst Sci 27:256–267

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM Research-Zurich, Säumerstrasse 4, CH-8803, Rüschlikon, Switzerland

    Matthias Schunter Dr.

Authors
  1. Matthias Schunter Dr.
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computing Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Henk C. A. van Tilborg

  2. Center for Secure Information Systems, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 22030-4422, USA

    Sushil Jajodia

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Schunter, M. (2011). Contract Signing. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A., Jajodia, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_189

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