On the efficient implementation of fair non-repudiation

Due to the explosive growth of electronic businesses carried on the Internet, non-repudiation services turn out to be increasingly important. Non-repudiation services protect the transacting parties against any false denial that a particular event or action has taken place, in which evidence will be generated, collected and maintained to enable the settlement of disputes. Several fair non-repudiation protocols have been proposed, which support non-repudiation of origin and non-repudiation of receipt while neither the originator nor the recipient can gain an advantage by quitting prematurely or otherwise misbehaving during a transaction. However, a critical issue on how to maintain the validity of non-repudiation evidence efficiently during and after a transaction was not considered. This paper uses the idea of evidence chaining to address such a problem.