Towards automated design of multi-party rational exchange security protocols

It is only recently that rational exchange schemes have been considered as an alternative solution to the exchange problem. A rational exchange protocol cannot provide fairness but it ensures that rational (i.e. self-interested) parties would have no reason to deviate from the protocol, as misbehaving is not beneficial. The common understanding of rationality as a security property has encouraged researchers to look for methods to formally analyze and categorize rational protocols. By contrast, in this paper we adopt a completely new approach as we present an automated tool to design multi-party rational exchange security protocols. Given a specific set of initial parameters the tool performs an heuristic search in the space of exchanging protocols, producing a rational exchange scheme as a solution. As this is work in progress, we will present the first results obtained executing the application in a three entity environment and a total set of six exchanging items.