A Review of Fair Exchange Protocols

Recently, the Internet has become an essential business platform, aiding trading, distribution and sales between organisations, consumers and even between consumers themselves. This technology revolution has brought e-commerce to an entirely new level, which therefore has raised some new security issues. Security protocols in e-commerce are required to manage the transactions between buyers and sellers. In order to engage customers in e-commerce, these protocols should be well formulated and secured; they should protect both parties from fraudulent users and subsequently promote the growth of e-commerce. There are some protocols, known as fair exchange protocols, in e-commerce that are designed to guarantee fairness between the customer and the merchant so that neither party gains any advantage over the other. Therefore, in this paper, we review these protocols in detail. In addition, we present a survey of three fair exchange protocols based on online TTP from different application areas. In particular, we review these protocols with regard to certain properties, namely, fairness, correctness of product, customer's anonymity, timeliness and channel requirement.