Fair non-repudiation for web services transactions

To safeguard the interests of transacting parties, non-repudiation mechanisms need to assure fairness and timeliness. The non-repudiation service currently implemented usually does not consider the requirement of fairness and the fair non-repudiation protocols to date can not be suitably applied in real environment due to its complex interaction. This paper discusses the transaction-oriented non-repudiation requirement for Web services transaction, analyzes the constraints of the traditional model for the available fair non-repudiation protocols and designs a new Online-TTP fair non-repudiation protocol. The new protocol provides a fair non-repudiation solution to secure Web services transactions and can be embedded into a single Web service call. The protocol adopts evidence chained to decreasing the overhead of evidence verification and management and alleviates the overhead of certificate revocation checking and time-stamp generation for signatures. The protocol has strong fairness, timeliness, efficiency and practicability.