Price Negotiation Systems for M-commerce

As content delivery to wireless devices becomes faster and scalable, it is likely that mobile commerce will constitute a significant portion of digital commerce. In markets, business activities are coordinated through prices- values businesses assigns to resources. Since different businesses usually assign different values to the same resource, the parties involved need to negotiate a mutually acceptable agreement, the agreement details both sensitive and valuable and should be well protected. Although numerous implementations of fair-exchange protocols have been proposed, research addressing secure yet efficient price negotiation systems has not been reported. In this paper, we propose a novel price negotiation protocol. We make three contributions to price negotiation protocols for M-commerce. Firstly, we propose a new notion called revealable ring-signatures and formalize it. Using revealable ring-signatures, we derive our price negotiation protocols. Secondly,we provide an efficient implementation of revealable ring-signatures by allowing an individual party to generate a committed string so that a real signer can be traced when the committed string is revealed. Finally, we show that our implementation is provably secure in the random oracle model assuming that discrete logarithm over Z*_p is hard.