Accelerated Verifiable Fair Digital Exchange

Abstract

A Fair Digital Exchange is defined as either all or none of the participants achieving a (predetermined) desirable outcome. This work addresses third party mediated systems for digital content where mutually unknown, and hence non-trusting, buyers, sellers and the mediator (third party) take part in an exchange protocol. We address the lack of guaranteed fairness, as defined above, in the existing platforms for this setting. We present TEDX, a decentralized solution for guaranteed three party fair exchange of digital goods with scalability and support for incremental deployment over the existing (non-fair) platforms. TEDX combines carefully crafted message exchanges with incentive schemes designed to deter malicious behavior. TEDX also leverages ideas from blockchain anchored state-channels to provide trusted execution while minimizing the operational overheads of blockchain. We present the design and a security analysis of TEDX to validate the claimed fairness properties. We also present the details of a prototype implementation of TEDX leveraging Hyperledger Fabric and performance evaluation of the same on a realistic testbed spanning five public cloud zones. Our results indicate that TEDX adds only a minimal overhead of 16% while being 46x faster than a naive blockchain solution, thereby demonstrating that TEDX is scalable.