Optimistic fair exchange E-commerce protocol based on secret sharing*

A key problem of electronic commerce (for short e-commerce) is fair exchange which guarantees that at the end of the transaction, either both parties involved in the transaction receive each other's items or none do. A non-interactive optimistic fair exchange e-commerce protocol model based on the publicly verifiable secret sharing is presented. The main idea of our exchange protocol is to interchange verifiable and recoverable keys of the symmetric encryption for participants' items. So it is especially suitable for exchange of large-size items. Furthermore, our protocol is efficient and simple as it does not need interactive proof system which has been adopted by a large quantity of previously proposed fair exchange protocols. Based on a modified (2,2) secret sharing scheme, a concrete non-interactive fair exchange e-commerce protocol is designed.