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Contract Coin: Toward Practical Contract Signing on Blockchain

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Information Security Practice and Experience (ISPEC 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 10701))

Abstract

We envision a scenario where contract signers put their portable document format (PDF) contract into a blockchain application that outputs a signed contract, while blockchain nodes don’t know the contract content, contract signers’ identities and contract signatures. Comparing to current centralized online contract signing services, blockchain applications could avoid single point of failure, internal attacks and data loss. More importantly, the application also provides fairness and privacy properties. By fairness, we mean that contract signers obtain a signed contract simultaneously, or obtain nothing, or some signer obtains a singed contract at the cost of paying contract coins. By privacy, we mean that contract contents, signatures, and signers’ identities are hidden from blockchain nodes. At last, we support RSA signatures whose verification is embedded in most PDF readers, which makes the whole solution practical.

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Acknowledgment

This work is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFB0802503), Natural Science Foundation of China (61672550), Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province, China (2015A030313133), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 17lgjc45). We are grateful to the fruitful discussion with Prof. Qianhong Wu about contract signers’ anonymity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Guangdong Key Laboratory of Information Security, School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, 510275, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China

    Haibo Tian, Jiejie He & Liqing Fu

Authors
  1. Haibo Tian
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  2. Jiejie He
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  3. Liqing Fu
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Correspondence to Haibo Tian .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia

    Joseph K. Liu

  2. University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Pierangela Samarati

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Tian, H., He, J., Fu, L. (2017). Contract Coin: Toward Practical Contract Signing on Blockchain. In: Liu, J., Samarati, P. (eds) Information Security Practice and Experience. ISPEC 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10701. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72359-4_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72359-4_3

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-72358-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-72359-4

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