Abstract
Fair digital signature of contracts and agreements is an essential process in any electronic commerce scenario, and therefore also in data marketplaces, where the relationships and agreements among the different parties (consumers and providers) are more dynamic. In multi-party contract signing, N parties wish to sign a contract in a such a way that either all signatories obtain evidence of the signing or none obtains conflicting evidence regarding the honest signatories; the exchange must be fair. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based multi-party contract signing protocol. This solution does not require the existence or potential intervention of a trusted third party (TTP), thus avoiding the difficulty of N signatories agreeing upon a TTP. In addition, this proposal meets the necessary requirements: fairness, timeliness, non-repudiation of origin, and non-repudiation of receipt. Furthermore, confidentiality can be easily achieved. To minimize costs associated with the use of blockchain, it should be invoked in the case of exception (analogous to optimistic solutions with a TTP) and by only one of the N signatories. However, when the use of blockchain is required, we show that its cost is within perfectly manageable margins.
Highlights
The signing of contracts is an essential process in conventional commerce
In this article, we present a scheme for multiparty contract signing based on blockchain that improves on the solutions presented to date: it is truly multi-party and, in addition, requires the use of the blockchain at a low cost when problems appear during contract signing
The main contribution of this paper is that we present the first proposal for multi-party contract signing based on the blockchain
Summary
The signing of contracts is an essential process in conventional commerce. When a contract is sufficiently important, a signature is obtained face to face to prevent one of the parties from cheating, for example, by obtaining a signed copy from the other party and not providing a signed copy; that is, the exchange must be fair. We found only one solution for signing contracts for three signatories [10], with the shortcoming that it is not extendable to N signatories For this reason, in this article, we present a scheme for multiparty contract signing based on blockchain (without TTP) that improves on the solutions presented to date: it is truly multi-party and, in addition, requires the use of the blockchain at a low cost when problems appear during contract signing. The previous proposals to sign contracts based on the blockchain, which we find in the analyzed bibliography, only allow the signing of contracts between two parties, except for one proposal that is designed for the signing of contracts between three parties It is the first proposal for N signatories (where N can be the desired value) that does not require the existence or the intervention of a TTP, as is the case in most of the classic proposals (with the inconveniences already indicated) for multi-party contract signing.
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