E-commerce and fair exchange - The problem of item validation

Fair exchange protocols have been widely studied since their proposal, but are still not implemented on most e-commerce transactions available. For several types of digital items (e-goods), the current e-commerce business models fail to provide fairness to customers. The item validation problem is a critical step in fair exchange, and is yet to receive the proper attention from researchers. We believe these issues should be addressed in a comprehensive and integrated fashion before fair exchange protocols can be effectively deployed in the marketplace. This is the aim of our research, and drawing attention to these problems and possible solutions is the goal of this paper.