Experiences in developing a fair-exchange e-commerce protocol using common off-the-shelf components

Fair-exchange is an important property that must be ensured in all electronic commerce environments where the merchants and the customers are reluctant to trust each other. This property guarantees that none of the transacting parties suffer because of the fraudulent behavior of the other party in the transaction. In this paper, we describe our experiences in developing a new e-commerce protocol to address the problem of fair-exchange for digital products. The protocol is based on a novel cryptographic technique that we had proposed earlier. We show how to use common off-the-shelf software components to develop such a protocol.