Trusted third party

About: Trusted third party is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2919 publications have been published within this topic receiving 60935 citations.

Handle passing using an inter-process communication

Abstract: Sharing access to resources using an inter-process communication (“IPC”) provides a connection in which references to resources may be passed from a sender to a receiver in a trusted third party environment. A sender in possession of a reference to a resource, such as a handle to an object, may initiate the connection with the receiver. In turn, the receiver may accept or refuse the connection, and may further specify the types of resources in which the receiver is interested when accepting through the connection. Sharing access to resources in this manner advantageously insures that only a process that already has access to a resource is able to share that access with another process, and further that only processes that wish to do so will accept such access.

System and method for conducting predefined transactions via an electronic mail messaging infrastructure

Abstract: An electronic mail transaction system for rule-based processing of e-mail messages to conduct predefined transactions via an electronic mail messaging infrastructure. Rules are defined for conducting various transactions. Senders and/or receivers specify a rule selected from among a common set of accepted rules. Preferably, each rule provides for automated retrieval of at least some required data elements from a data store. The data store may be stored privately, which protects the privacy of users of the system. Senders and receivers can then conduct transactions according to the predefined rules, which standardizes and facilitates the transactions. Establishment, management and/or approval of rules by a trusted third party intermediary protects and engenders trust in users of the system and facilitates order and efficiency. The system permits users to conduct transactions without a continuous network connection, i.e., in 'burst' mode or asynchronously, which conserves network resources, heightens convenience and reduces costs to users.

Optimally Efficient Multi-Party Fair Exchange and Fair Secure Multi-Party Computation

Abstract: Multi-party fair exchange (MFE) and fair secure multi-party computation (fair SMPC) are under-studied fields of research, with practical importance. We examine MFE scenarios where every participant has some item, and at the end of the protocol, either every participant receives every other participant’s item, or no participant receives anything. This is a particularly hard scenario, even though it is directly applicable to protocols such as fair SMPC or multi-party contract signing. We further generalize our protocol to work for any exchange topology. We analyze the case where a trusted third party (TTP) is optimistically available, although we emphasize that the trust put on the TTP is only regarding the fairness, and our protocols preserve the privacy of the exchanged items even against a malicious TTP.

Network-based call hold stand by

Abstract: A telecommunications network-based method for alerting a calling party, placed on hold by the called party, that a called party is ready to communicate comprising the steps of receiving an activation signal for activating the network-based system; monitoring the called party's telephone line for availability, where "availability" refers to the situation when the called party removes the hold condition or when the called party is ready to communicate with the calling party, and informing the called party that the Call Hold Stand-by service is alerting the calling party that the called party is available. The network-based method can operate as calling party feature, independent of the called party, or as a feature that is provided by the called party to the calling party.

Authenticated Key Exchange over Bitcoin

Abstract: Bitcoin is designed to protect user anonymity or pseudo nymity in a financial transaction, and has been increasingly adopted by major e-commerce websites such as Dell, PayPal and Expedia. While the anonymity of Bitcoin transactions has been extensively studied, little attention has been paid to the security of post-transaction correspondence. In a commercial application, the merchant and the user often need to engage in follow-up correspondence after a Bitcoin transaction is completed, e.g., to acknowledge the receipt of payment, to confirm the billing address, to arrange the product delivery, to discuss refund and so on. Currently, such follow-up correspondence is typically done in plaintext via email with no guarantee on confidentiality. Obviously, leakage of sensitive data from the correspondence e.g., billing address can trivially compromise the anonymity of Bitcoin users. In this paper, we initiate the first study on how to realise end-to-end secure communication between Bitcoin users in a post-transaction scenario without requiring any trusted third party or additional authentication credentials. This is an important new area that has not been covered by any IEEE or ISO/IEC security standard, as none of the existing PKI-based or password-based AKE schemes are suitable for the purpose. Instead, our idea is to leverage the Bitcoin's append-only ledger as an additional layer of authentication between previously confirmed transactions. This naturally leads to a new category of AKE protocols that bootstrap trust entirely from the block chain. We call this new category "Bitcoin-based AKE" and present two concrete protocols: one is non-interactive with no forward secrecy, while the other is interactive with additional guarantee of forward secrecy. Finally, we present proof-of-concept prototypes for both protocols with experimental results to demonstrate their practical feasibility.