An identity-based scheme of fair exchange of digital signatures

Fair exchange of digital signatures is an important tool for signing digital contracts, e-payment and other electronic commerce actions. An ID-based scheme of fair exchange of digital signature is proposed in this paper. The protocol relies on a trusted third party, but is "optimistic", in that the third party is only needed in cases where one player attempts to cheat or simply crashes. The proposed scheme has properties of short signature, low computation and verification cost. It can realize exchange of digital signatures fairly and efficiently. A key feature of our scheme is that it is identity-based, which needs no certificates and has a simple key management. To our best knowledge, this is the first identity-based scheme of fair exchange of digital signatures.