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Gracefully Degrading Fair Exchange with Security Modules

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Dependable Computing - EDCC 5 (EDCC 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 3463))

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Abstract

The fair exchange problem is key to trading electronic items in systems of mutually untrusted parties. In modern variants of such systems, each party is equipped with a security module. The security modules trust each other but can only communicate by exchanging messages through their untrusted host parties, that could drop those messages.

We describe a synchronous algorithm that ensures deterministic fair exchange if a majority of parties are honest, which is optimal in terms of resilience. If there is no honest majority, our algorithm degrades gracefully: it ensures that the probability of unfairness can be made arbitrarily low.

Our algorithm uses, as an underlying building block, an early-stopping subprotocol that solves, in a general omission failure model, a specific variant of consensus we call biased consensus. Interestingly, this modular approach combines concepts from both cryptography and distributed computing, to derive new results on the classical fair exchange problem.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Security and Cryptography Laboratory, EPFL, Switzerland

    Gildas Avoine

  2. Dependable Distributed Systems Laboratory, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

    Felix Gärtner

  3. Distributed Programming Laboratory, EPFL, Switzerland

    Rachid Guerraoui & Marko Vukolić

Authors
  1. Gildas Avoine
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  2. Felix Gärtner
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  3. Rachid Guerraoui
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  4. Marko Vukolić
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Computer Sciences III, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Martensstr. 3, 91058, Erlangen, Germany

    Mario Dal Cin

  2. UPS, INSA, INP, ISAE; LAAS-CNRS, Université de Toulouse, Toulouse, France

    Mohamed Kaâniche

  3. Department of Measurement and Information Systems, Budapest University of Technology and Economics,  

    András Pataricza

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Avoine, G., Gärtner, F., Guerraoui, R., Vukolić, M. (2005). Gracefully Degrading Fair Exchange with Security Modules. In: Dal Cin, M., Kaâniche, M., Pataricza, A. (eds) Dependable Computing - EDCC 5. EDCC 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3463. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11408901_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11408901_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-25723-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32019-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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