Indrakshi Ray, An Anonymous Fair-Exchange E-Commerce Protocol

Many business transactions over the Internet involve the exchange of digital products between two parties -- electronic mails, digital audio and video, electronic contract signing and digital signatures, to name a few. Often these transactions occur between players that do not always have identifiable place of doing business and hence do not trust each other. Consequently, there exists ample scope for any of the parties involved, to misbehave and gain advantage over the other party. To overcome this problem researchers have proposed protocols that ensure fairness, that is, no party can gain an advantage even if the party misbehaves. Most works in this area focus on gathering evidence during the protocol execution that is used later, in case of a dispute. The actual handling of the dispute is done manually, after the protocol execution, and is outside the scope of the protocol. However, in an electronic commerce environment, where the merchants and customers may disappear quickly, such "after-the-fact" protection may be inadequate. In this work we propose an e-commerce protocol for trading digital products over the Internet. The novel features of our protocol include: (1) ensuring fair exchange, (2) not requiring manual dispute resolution in case of unfair behavior by any party, (3) assuring each party that the item he is about to receive is indeed the correct one, (4) not requiring the active involvement of a trusted third party unless a problem occurs, and (5) ensuring anonymity for the customer. About the speaker: Indrakshi Ray is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Colorado State University. She received her Ph.D. from George Mason University in the area of Information Technology. Her research spans the areas of computer security, e-commerce, database systems and formal methods. Her research is currently supported by grants from the Airforce Office of Scientific Research, the Airforce Research Laboratory, the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Science Foundation. She was the Program Chair for the 17th IFIP WG 11.3 Conference on Data and Applications Security. She is a Program Committee Member for numerous conferences in Computer Security and Database Technology, such as, ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies, and Extending Database Technology.