Formal analysis of timeliness in electronic commerce protocols

While some logic analysis method has been used in the analysis of electronic commerce protocols for its simplicity, their lack of the ability in time description makes it helpless in the analysis of timeliness, which is one of the most important properties of electronic protocols. a novel logic is proposed by adding a simple time expression and analysis method to remedy the defect. Then a widely discussed fair non-repudiation proposed by Zhou and Gollmann and one of its improvements are analyzed with the newly extended logic. The result shows that Zhou-Gollmann's fair non-repudiation protocol does not provide timeliness while its improvement does. Therefore, the novel logic has the ability to describe and analyze the timeliness of electronic commerce protocols. The novel logic in this paper is not only a simple logic method, but also an integrated approach. In addition, the novel logic can provide reference for other method to improve the ability of analyzing the time-related properties.