FIDES addresses an important topic of research and development of e-commerce systems and technologies that manage and process electronic information in the area of fraud control, security and privacy. The main obstacle to a fully automated electronic data exchange process is the lack of a practical and adequate security software solution providing fair data exchange and non-repudiation. This problem results in inadequate fraud control and security protection for e-commerce activities in heterogeneous network environments, and inhibits further development of e-commerce.

Fair exchange is the term used in modern e-commerce systems denoting a security property - either all participating parties (i.e. customers, merchants or partners) receive the valuable data items they expect (e.g. e-payments, digital signatures on a contract or e-goods) - or none of them receives anything useful.

Non-repudiation refers to the security property where all the parties involved are held accountable for the electronic data they send or receive during the course of a transaction. In other words, business parties will have undeniable evidence for the transaction they perform and cannot later falsely deny having sent or received a particular item, e.g. an e-mail, a purchase order, or an e-payment.

FIDES allows businesses to conduct e-commerce transactions involving exchanges of items of value securely, verifiably and quickly, across the widest range of systems and platforms, and involving different types of business items. FIDES is aimed at developing a complete "end-to-end" solution for automatic provision of the important non-repudiation and fair exchange services that are essential to secure electronic information exchange via the Internet. The FIDES services are designed in a configurable, interoperable, and scalable way and are accessible within two of the foremost business application development architectures – the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE).

For more information, see our publications and project reports in the Downloads section.

Here, you may find the links to the selected conference and journal publications reporting on the FIDES project research work. Note that the corresponding copyrights are held by the publishers.

[1] Zhang, N., Shi, Q., An Efficient Protocol for Anonymous and Fair Document Exchange, Computer Networks Journal, Elsevier Science Publisher, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2003, pp. 19-28. (link)

[2] Shi, Q., Zhang, N., Merabti, M., Signature-Based Approach to Fair Document Exchange, IEE Proceedings - Communications, Vol. 150, No. 1, 2003, pp. 21-27. (link)

[3] Zhang, N., Shi, Q., Merabti, M., A Unified Approach to a Fair Document Exchange System, to appear in Journal of Systems and Software, Elsevier Science Publisher. (link)(pdf)

[4] Nenadic, A., Zhang, N., Barton, S., Fair Certified E-mail Delivery, Proceedings of the 9th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2004) - Computer Security Track, 2004, Nicosia, Cyprus, pp. 391-396. (pdf)

[5] Nenadic, A., Zhang, N., Barton, S., A Security Protocol for Certified E-Goods Delivery, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Information Technology, Coding and Computing (ITCC 2004) - Information Assurance and Security Track, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, IEEE Computer Society, 2004, pp. 22-28. (pdf)

[6] Nenadic, A., Zhang, N. Barton, S., A Secure and Fair DSA-based Signature Exchange Protocol, Proceedings of the 9th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC 2004), Alexandria, Egypt, IEEE Computer Society, 2004, pp.412-417. (pdf)

[7] Nenadic, A., Zhang, N., Barton, S., FIDES - A Middleware E-Commerce Security Solution, Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Information Warfare and Security (ECIW 2004), London, UK, 2004. (pdf)

• Mr Paul Morrison is Product Manager at PrismTech Ltd and the FIDES Project Manager.
  e-mail: epm@prismtechnologies.com
• Dr. Ning Zhang is an academic member at the Department of Computer Science and the FIDES Project Principal Investigator. She has an extensive research experience in information, e-commerce and distributed systems security.
  e-mail: nzhang@cs.man.ac.uk
• Alexandra Nenadic is a Research Associate at Computer Science Department, University of Manchester. She is also doing a PhD in security at the same department.
  e-mail: anenadic@cs.man.ac.uk