A Three-Party Optimistic Certified Email Protocol Using Verifiably Encrypted Signature Scheme for Line Topology

While many two-party fair exchange protocols have been proposed, more than three-party fair exchange protocol is required depending on a type of applications. Asokan et al. have proposed a multi-party fair exchange protocol for mesh topology. This scheme can be adapted to all kinds of topologies but requires much communication costs, which is 4n(n-1) passes in the all n-participators honest cases and 8n2-n-10 passes in the worst case. In previous works, more efficient and multi-functional schemes specialized for a kind of topologies have been proposed but most of these are for ring topology and star topology. Zhou et al. have proposed an efficient multi-party contract signing protocol for line topology. It is shown the two protocols such that a simple protocol which is completed with 4(n-1) passes in the all honest cases and 5n-3 passes in the worst case and an optimized protocol which is completed with 3(n-1) passes in the all honest cases and 4n-2 passes in the worst. This result means that a fair exchange protocol for line topology is efficient in a number of communications nevertheless a certified email protocol specialized for line topology has not been proposed. That is, a certified email protocol run on line topology is only a protocol for mesh proposed by Asokan et al. adapted to line topology, therefore there is large room for reducing a number of communications by specializing for a certified email protocol. In this paper, we propose a three-party certified email protocol for line topology towards a design of n-party protocol. The proposed protocol has such basic properties of certified email as fairness, non-repudiation, trusted third party invisibility and timeliness, as same as the previous works. Our scheme is completed with eight passes in the case of all honest and twelve passes in the worst. The communication cost is less than the Asokan et al.'s scheme with 24 (n=3) passes even if the all n-participators are honest.