Non-repudiation in an agent-based electronic commerce system

ABECOS is an agent-based e-commerce system under development at the Nanyang Technological University. A key factor in making this system usable in practice is strict security control. One aspect of security is the provision of non-repudiation services. As protocols for non-repudiation have focused on message non-repudiation, its adaptation to afford non-repudiation in a communication session for two agents in ABECOS is inefficient. In this work, we investigate and propose a protocol for enforcing non-repudiation in a session. The protocol is believed to be applicable in any e-commerce system; agent- or not agent-based.