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E-commerce of digital items and the problem of item validation: introducing the concept of reversible degradation

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Abstract

Fair exchange protocols have been widely studied since their proposal, but are still not implemented on most e-commerce transactions available. For several types of digital items (e-goods), the current e-commerce business model fails to provide fairness to customers. The item validation problem is a critical step in fair exchange, and is yet to receive the proper attention from researchers. We believe these issues should be addressed in a comprehensive and integrated fashion before fair exchange protocols can be effectively deployed in the marketplace. In this work, we contextualize how the current model for buying and selling digital items fails, by overlooking the subtleties of the item validation problem, to provide guarantees of a successful transaction outcome to customers—thus being unfair by design. We also introduce the concept of Reversible Degradation, a method for enhancing buy–sell transactions concerning digital items that inherently includes the item validation step in the purchase protocol in order to tackle the discussed problems. In this paper we further explore the concept of reversible degradation (Piva and Dahab in Proceedings of international conference on security and cryptography (SECRYPT). SciTePress Digital Library, 2011) and propose a deliverable instantiation based on systematic error correction codes, suitable for multimedia content. We describe our technique in detail and provide methods for key generation, degradation and recovery, as well as a discussion about efficiency, security and flexibility. We also present and discuss experimental data, and exemplify how the technique can be useful for enabling item validation and dispute resolution in some application scenarios.

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Notes

  1. In fact, “no efficient method (i.e., without TTP interaction) is known to make arbitrary goods strongly generatable” [40].

  2. Even though the proposed technique can be implemented with symbols of different sizes, it should be taken into account that the symbol size affects not only the number of required encoding/decoding operations, but also the efficiency of the technique as a whole—larger symbols mean more expensive algebraic operations.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the financial support of the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). We also thank the reviewers for their careful reading and valuable remarks. Finally, the first author would like to thank the Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt (CASED) for hosting him during his leave from the University of Campinas (UNICAMP).

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  1. Institute of Computing, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas, Brazil

    Fabio Piva & Ricardo Dahab

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  1. Fabio Piva
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  2. Ricardo Dahab
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Correspondence to Fabio Piva.

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Piva, F., Dahab, R. E-commerce of digital items and the problem of item validation: introducing the concept of reversible degradation. AAECC 24, 277–308 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00200-013-0197-9

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