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Commercial transactions, time-stamping and trusted entities


The area of cyber-economy and electronic transactions is developing very rapidly. Digital signatures have been proposed to solve some of the problems related with security and privacy. For example DigiCash uses a mechanism of so called blind digital signatures.

The inherent limitation of the use of digital signatures is their inability to provide time-related non-repudiation. While a digital signature attached to a message will have a time-stamped audit trail through the network, digital signatures cannot, in the absence of a trusted entity, provide an non-forgeable, trusted time stamp [OTA94].

The key attributes of a trusted entity are that it is a disinterested third party trusted by the parties to the transaction and subject to the dispute resolution mechanisms relevant to a transaction or record. A trusted entity can perform a variety of functions to facilitate electronic contracts [OTA94]:


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mtu@cs.hut.fi - 04 DEC 95