AbstractDelivering electronic goods over the Internet is one of the e-commerce applications that will proliferate in the coming years. Certified e-goods delivery is a process where valuable e-goods are exchanged for an acknowledgement of their reception. This paper proposes an efficient security protocol for certified e-goods delivery with the following features: (1) it ensures strong fairness for the exchange of e-goods and proof of reception, (2) it ensures non-repudiation of origin and non-repudiation of receipt for the delivered e-goods, (3) it all ows the receiver of e-goods to verify, during the exchange process, that the e-goods to be received are the one he is signing the receipt for, (4) it uses an off-line and transparent semi-trusted third party (STTP) only in cases when disput es arise, (5) it provides the confidentiality protection for the exchanged items from the STTP, and (6) achieves these features with less computational and communicational overheads than related protocols.