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Building Blocks for Atomicity in Electronic Commerce
Jiawen Su and J.D. Tygar
Department of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA
Abstract
Atomicity is clearly a central problem for electronic commerce
protocols -- we can not tolerate electronic commerce systems where
money is arbitrarily created or destroyed. Moreover, these atomicity
properties should be retained in the event of component failures in
distributed systems. In this paper, we enumerate several classes of
atomic protocols. We then give two fundamental building blocks for
building atomic electronic commerce protocols: encryption-based
atomicity and authority-based atomicity. We then illustrate these
building blocks by considering variations of payment-server based
protocols that use these different building blocks. The results give
a contrast to the class of protocols that we have previously examined
in our work with NetBill.
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