Abstract
Mobile agents have been advocated to support electronic commerce over the Internet. While being a promising paradigm, many intricate problems need to be solved to make this vision reality. The problem of fair exchange between two agents is one such fundamental problem. Informally speaking, this means to exchange two electronic items in such a way that neither agent suffers a disadvantage. We study the problem of fair exchange in the mobile agent paradigm. We show that while existing protocols for fair exchange can be substantially simplified in the context of mobile agents, there are still many problems related to security which remain difficult to solve. We propose three increasingly flexible solutions to the fair exchange problem and show how to implement them using existing agent technology. The basis for ensuring the security properties of fair exchange is a tamper-proof hardware device called a trusted processing environment.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Asokan, N.: Fairness in electronic commerce. PhD thesis, University of Waterloo (May 1998)
Asokan, N., Schunter, M., Waidner, M.: Optimistic protocols for fair exchange. In: Matsumoto, T. (ed.) 4th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Zurich, Switzerland, pp. 8–17. ACM Press, New York (1997)
Denning, D.E.: A lattice model of secure information flow. Communications of the ACM 19(5), 236–243 (1976)
Franklin, M.K., Reiter, M.K.: Fair exchange with a semi-trusted third party. In: Matsumoto, T. (ed.) 4th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Zurich, Switzerland, pp. 1–5. ACM Press, New York (1997)
Gärtner, F.C., Pagnia, H., Vogt, H.: Approaching a formal definition of fairness in electronic commerce. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Electronic Commerce (WELCOM 1999), Lausanne, Switzerland, pp. 354–359. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (1999)
Hohl, F.: Time limited blackbox security: Protecting mobile agents from malicious hosts. In: Vigna [13], pp. 92–113.
Johansen, D., Marzullo, K., Schneider, F.B., Jacobsen, K., Zagorodnov, D.: NAP: Practical fault-tolerance for itinerant computations. In: Gouda, M.G. (ed.) Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Austin, Texas, pp. 180–189. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (1999)
Pagnia, H., Gärtner, F.C.: On the impossibility of fair exchange without a trusted third party. Technical Report TUD-BS-1999-02, Darmstadt University of Technology, Department of Computer Science, Darmstadt, Germany (March 1999), A substantially revised version is available upon request from the authors, http://www.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/BS/Gaertner/publications/TUD-BS-1999-02.ps.gz
Roth, V.: Mutual protection of co-operating agents. In: Vitek, J. (ed.) Secure Internet Programming. LNCS, vol. 1603, pp. 277–287. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Rothermel, K., Straßer, M.: A Fault-Tolerant Protocol for Providing the Exactly-Once Property of Mobile Agents. In: Proc. 17th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems 1998 (SRDS 1998), Los Alamitos, California, pp. 100–108. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (1998)
Sander, T., Tschudin, C.F.: Protecting mobile agents against malicious hosts. In: Vigna [13]
Schneider, S.: Formal analysis of a non-repudiation protocol. In: PCSFW: Proceedings of The 11th Computer Security Foundations Workshop, pp. 54–65. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (1998)
Vigna, G. (ed.): Mobile Agents and Security. LNCS, vol. 1419. Springer, Heidelberg (1998)
Vogt, H., Pagnia, H., Gärtner, F.C.: Modular fair exchange protocols for electronic commerce. In: Proceedings of the 15th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, Phoenix, Arizona, pp. 3–11. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (1999)
Wilhelm, U.G.: A Technical Approach to Privacy based on Mobile Agents protected by Tamper-resistant Hardware. PhD thesis, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland (May 1999)
Wilhelm, U.G., Buttyàn, L., Staamann, S.: On the problem of trust in mobile agent systems. In: Symposium on Network and Distributed System Security, March 1998, pp. 114–124. Internet Society (1998)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Pagnia, H., Vogt, H., Gärtner, F.C., Wilhelm, U.G. (2000). Solving Fair Exchange with Mobile Agents. In: Kotz, D., Mattern, F. (eds) Agent Systems, Mobile Agents, and Applications. ASA MA 2000 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1882. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45347-5_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45347-5_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-41052-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45347-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive