. In this paper, we report on a recent work for the verication of nonrepudiation

As a value-added service to deliver important data over the Internet with guaranteed receipt for each successful delivery, certified email has been discussed for years and a number of research papers appeared in the literature. But most of them deal with the two-party scenarios, i.e., there are only one sender and one recipient. In some applications, however, the same certified message may need to be sent to a set of recipients. In ISC'02, Ferrer-Gomila et. al. presented a multi-party certified email protocol [5]. It has two major features. A sender could notify multiple recipients of the same information while only those recipients who acknowledged are able to get the information. In addition, its exchange protocol is optimized, which has only three steps. In this paper, we demonstrate some flaws and weaknesses in that protocol, and propose an improved version which is robust against the identified attacks while preserving the features of the original protocol.

In 1999, Bao et al. proposed [5] a multi-party fair exchange protocol of electronic items with an o ine trusted third party. In this protocol, a coalition including the initiator of the exchange can succeed in excluding a group of parties without the consent of the remaining entities. We show that every participant must trust the initiator of the protocol for not becoming a passive conspirator. We propose a new protocol in which the participants only need to trust the trusted third party.