Auditable Protocols for Fair Payment and Physical Asset Delivery Based on Smart Contracts

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 7; pp. 109439 - 109453
• Main Authors: Wang, Shangping, Tang, Xixi, Zhang, Yaling, Chen, Juanjuan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: assets audit; Bitcoin; Blockchain; Companies; Computer networks; Consumers; Contracts; Cost analysis; Cryptography; Data retrieval; Fraud; Logistics; Online transactions; Protocol (computers); Security; smart contract; Smart contracts; Transportation
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2933860

With the rapid development of electronic information technology, online transaction will gradually surpass traditional market transaction, among which online payment and asset delivery become the focus of attention. But in fact, due to the incomplete third-party payment mechanism and the intrusion risk of various charging Trojan, it is easy to cause a trust crisis. The existing centralized framework often leads to information asymmetry between the two parties. Therefore, how to realize the fairness of payment and the auditability of assets in the distributed system is a challenging problem. The emerging blockchain technology provides a new method with its openness, transparency and verifiability. Existing researches do not provide a complete shopping model for consumers, most of which focuses on payments or only on asset delivery. In this paper, we propose an auditable fair payment and physical asset delivery protocol based on smart contracts. Three types of smart contracts are designed to achieve reliable and fair payment among merchants, consumers and logistics companies. The traceability and auditability of blockchain provide an effective method to audit assets and data sharing in the whole transportation. In view of the phenomenon of goods being switched, the way of "pre-verification" is added. In order to prevent the illegal elements to fake pickup code, induce consumers to conduct illegal operations, cause property loss, in our system the pickup codes are generated by consumers to reduce the risk of fraud. In addition, our plan designs a complete return process for the first time, providing better service experience and higher efficiency for consumers. Finally, all the contracts involved in the scheme are implemented and deployed on the ethereum test network. The results of security analysis and evaluation showed that our scheme was improved in cost, with high security and availability.