Secure Group Barter: Multi-party Fair Exchange with Semi-Trusted Neutral Parties

The recent surge in popularity of e-commerce prompted a lot of The recent surge in popularity of e-commerce prompted a lot of activity in the area of electronic payments. Solutions have been developed for cash, credit card and check-based electronic transactions. Much less attention has been paid to non-monetary commerce such as barter. In this paper we discuss the notion of “secure group barter” or multi-party fair exchange. We develop a classification of types of barter schemes and present new cryptographic protocols for multi-party exchange with fairness. These protocols assume the presence of a “semi-trusted neutral party”.

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