A Multi-party Contract Signing Protocol and Its Implementation via Trusted Computing

E-commerce (EC) over open devices and networks poses security challenges of a new dimension. This article presents a multi-party contract signing (MPCS) protocol to demonstrate how to apply the secure EC protocols to trading terminals supported by trusted computing (TC) technology. The protocol here reduces the number of rounds to two and the message transmission number to O(n
²
), which is the best known so far. Leveraging the TC technology, an infrastructure of trusted terminal is proposed to guarantee the integrity and trustworthiness of the terminals, with the confidentiality and authenticity of the communication channels ensured by the trusted network connection (TNC) technology.