Resolve-Impossibility for a Contract-Signing Protocol

Abstract. A multi-party contract signing protocol allows a set of participants to exchange messages with each other with a view to arriving in a state in which each of them has a pre-agreed contract text signed by all the others. Such a protocol was introduced by Garay and MacKenzie in 1999; it consists of a main protocol and a sub-protocol involving a trusted party. Their protocol was shown to have a flaw by Chadha, Kremer and Scedrov in CSFW 2004. Those authors also presented a fix – a revised sub-protocol for the trusted party. In our work, we show an attack on the revised protocol for any number n > 4 of signers. Furthermore, we generalise our attack to show that the message exchange structure of Garay and MacKenzie’s main protocol is flawed: whatever the trusted party does will result in unfairness for some signer. This means that it is impossible to define a trusted party protocol for Garay and MacKenzie’s main protocol; we call this “resolveimpossibility”.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CSFW
• Authors: Aybek Mukhamedov, Mark Dermot Ryan
• Keywords: Contract Signing Protocol, CSFW 2006, MacKenzie’s Main Protocol, Main Protocol, Security Privacy