Multi-party fair exchange with an off-line trusted neutral party

Recently developed cryptographic techniques make it possible to construct fair exchange protocols with an off-line trusted third party (TTP). The technique is referred to as a verifiable encryption scheme (VES) and proves that a ciphertext is the result of the encryption of a specified value without revealing this value. In this paper we apply the technique to multi-party fair exchange (MPFE) protocols which leads to the trusted neutral party (TNP, it is not the third party in multi-party protocols) involved in the protocol to be off-line. Multi-party fair exchange has been studied by Asokan et al. (1996) and Franklin and Tsudik (1998) where the TNP is on-line. For off-line TNP-based MPFE, the issues are different from that of on-line TNP MPFE. We give a definition of fairness of the MPFE with off-line TNP. We then present our MPFE protocol and prove its fairness.