Proceedings

ANALYZING E-COMMERCE PROTOCOLS
Carmen TIMOFTE 1
Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, Romania
ABSTRACT
Many researchers have looked at the problem of verifying e-commerce protocols, but much
work remains to be done. On the final, I present the trends for the utilization of formal
methods for the verification of modern complicated protocols and protocol suites for the real
commercial world.
KEYWORDS: E-commerce, protocols, SET, AADS, 3D Secure, SSL.
INTRODUCTION
Electronic commerce requires protocols of great complexity. To make a purchase over
the Internet, the customer typically submits his credit card number to the merchant,
protected by a protocol such as SSL. However, many potential customers are uneasy
about revealing their credit card number over the Internet. The SET protocol has been
proposed by a consortium of credit card and software companies.
SET aims to protect sensitive card-holder information, to ensure payment integrity
and to authenticate merchants and card-holders.
The paper provides a review of the existing e-commerce protocols, making an
analysis of their most important characteristics. The purpose is to determine the trends
and to present a formal method for verification of these protocols.
1. OVERVIEW OF EXISTING PROTOCOLS
All existing protocols (A & M, 2007) use cryptographic functions like: message
digest (integrity), secret key encryption (privacy), public key, encryption (privacy and
authentication), digital envelopes (integrity and privacy), digital signatures
(authentication), digital certificates (authentication).
E-commerce protocols that were developed and some of them, used, more often or
less often, are:
• SET (Secure Electronic Transaction)- in 1996 it was developed by Visa şi
Mastercard, with the assistence of IBM, Microsoft, Netscape, GTE, SAIC,
Terisa and Verisign;
1
Correspondence address: Carmen TIMOFTE, Economic Informatics Department, Academy of
Economic Studies; email: carmen@ase.ro
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