1. the Emerging Information Society:
Electronic commerce is experiencing tremendous growth over the Internet. It is projected that by the year 2000, transactions worth over $25 billion will have been conducted via the new medium.
2. Such an electronic marketplace requires secure and establishing sufficient trust
3. Achivements:
payment, cryptography, intellectual property rights protection
however, they did not give enough attendtion to integrate the various solutions in a consistent way.
4. SEMPER(Secure Electronic Marketplace for Europe):
backed by the Eropean Commission and IBM Zurich Research Lab provides the technical lerdership for this project , proposes an open security framework that should provide for such an integrated, complete and global electronic marketplace.
1. Requirements:
In the traditional marketplace, every operation, apart from the exchange of physical goods and services, is based on information: offers, brokerage, negotiations, orders, contracts, payments, documents, receipts and the resolution of disputes. The model of the traditional marketplace is, therefore, perfectly suited to the electronic marketplace, provided that its characteristics and requirements are appropriately translated in electronic terms. With the disappearance of the physical presence of the parties, trust also vanishes, especially when communication is conducted via an insecure medium like the Internet. The viability of electronic commerce requires that trust be restored. The recovery of transactions and the resolution of disputes must also be guaranteed in order to provide the parties with genuine recourse should equipment or network failures occur, or if they are confronted by dishonest practices on the part of their business partner.
2. Fundamental Issues:
2.1 the techniques which are capable of meeting the trust requirements described are highly complex and the tools which support these techniques must be integrated into systems. These systems need to address the complete set of issues raised by the electronic marketplace. 2.2 Second, users must be able to trust that their systems are, in fact, behaving as they appear to be behaving and are protected against security attacks. 2.3 Third, these systems must be fully interoperable, and despite their heterogeneous nature, they must guarantee that no important information can be lost. 2.4 Fourth, electronic commerce needs to be backed by a legal framework which provides users with a transparent and predictable legal environment which is adapted to the medium and includes the legal acceptance of digital signatures and electronic information appropriately authenticated as evidence in case of dispute. This framework should be valid, regardless of the jurisdictions in which buyers and sellers reside. This is particularly true for crossborder commerce, 2.5 Fifth, security assumes that there is a network of registration, certification, and key distribution authorities, whether public or private.
3. Curent Status:
three waves on the Internet Business
3.1 After a first wave of products and implementations of Web sites which were designed for the narrow perspective of marketing and promoting enterprises and commercial outlets on the Internet, 3.2 the second wave began to make the Web more interactive and captivating, as the technology and company know-how evolved. Digital libraries and online catalogs emerged. 3.3 With the third wave of Internet-related technology, emerging in 1996, it has become possible to authenticate the parties, allow customers to browse through catalogs, to place orders, to pay for them, to receive the goods and to access online services. Progress has been made with respect to secure payment with credit cards, based on the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocols from Netscape, but more importantly, based on the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol from VISA and MasterCard. Further progress has also been achieved in the area of electronic cheques, electronic cash, and micro-payment with stored-value smartcards. However, all other technical projects deal only with specific aspects of secure electronic commerce. There is no generally accepted model and architecture for building the secure marketplace. As a result, security requirements are not well formulated. Due to their proprietary architecture most electronic commerce systems are closed and are, therefore, not aimed at achieving the objective of interoperability among systems. Issues of primary importance with regard to trust receive insufficient attention, if any. They include a trusted user interface, fair exchanges among the parties, non-repudiation, two- and multi-party contract signing, anonymity, privacy, multi-party security, and the resolution of disputes.
4. SEMPER objectives:
addressing the complete problem of electronic commerce over insecure networks, such as the Internet. Its main goal consists of developing an open and comprehensive security framework which can be regarded as a blue-print, a lingua franca, for building the secure marketplace. SEMPER’s flexible open architecture is based on a model of electronic commerce which comprehends a business scenario as a sequence of transfers and fair exchanges of "business items", which are payments, data, or rights. It is developing a model of the electronic marketplace, and an open, generic, security architecture, independent of specific hardware, software, and networks. The security architecture is intended to support any business application of electronic commerce which can be expressed as a series of exchanges. It should be able to support plugins of new components, for example, new payment protocols, new applications, etc.
1. Model
The architecture described in this paper is based on a generic model for two-party electronic commerce. This model describes the flow of control as well as actions, and decisions for any commerce service. The main idea of the model for electronic commerce is describing business scenarios in terms of sequences of "transfers" and "exchanges" of data with decisions based on the success of these actions (see Figure). This model is similar to the dialogues of interactive EDI.
2. Basic Concepts:
2.1 "Transfer" : In a transfer, one party sends a package of business items to one or more other parties. The sending party can define certain security requirements, such as confidentiality, anonymity, or non-repudiation of origin. 2.2 "Exange" : A fair exchange is a simultaneous exchange of packages of business items among two parties. The parties have the assurance that their packages are sent if and only if the peer entity send their package as expected. Either both packages are exchanged or none. If no fairness guarantee is required, we can model such an exchange by two transfers. 2.3 "Business Items":(see figure) · credentials, such as access rights, · statements, such as signed documents, certificates, or program and video data, and · money, such as credit card, cash, or bank transfer payments.
3. Electronic Commerce: Sequence of Exchanges
In the course of an ongoing business, after each transfer or exchange, the parties are either · satisfied, and thus willing to proceed with a certain number of other transfers or exchanges, or · dissatisfied, in which case an exception or dispute is raised which might end up at a real court if all else fails, depending on the success of the previous exchange, the items received, and possibly user-input. After each round, a decision as to whether and how to proceed is made.
SEMPER architecture is structured inlayers. The lowest layer deals with low-level security primitives and other supporting services, whereas the highest layer deals with commerce issues only:(see figure 1(SEMPER Architecture) and figure 2 (SEMPER Integration with Client-Server) )
· The supporting services are the usual cryptographic services, communication, archiving of data (keys, non-repudiation tokens, audit trail), setting preferences, and the trusted user interface. · The exchange layer supports fair exchange and transfer services. · The commerce layer offers high-level services for business scenarios like "mail-order retailing" , "online purchase of information", or "registration with service provider". It is configurable by downloading new services or extending existing ones.
1. Commerce Service
The Commerce Layer provides services that directly implement protocols of business scenarios, e.g., how specific merchants or types of merchants handle customer registration and offering, ordering, payment, and delivery of goods. It implements the flow of control, i.e., the enabled sequences of exchanges, of the electronic commerce model. A set of client and server commerce services is the electronic equivalent of the "terms of business" for the seller. The commerce layer does not only offer entire such protocols, but also building blocks that may be of more general use, in particular services to manage and fill out standardized order forms. Since one cannot fix the set of services in advance, the commerce layer includes services for secure downloading of services. This allows customers to participate in business scenarios they never encountered before. Since arbitrary terms of business may be implemented in a new commerce service, a downloaded service need not be secure at all. Security of the implemented services can only be ensured by a separate evaluation, e.g., by trusted consumer organizations who issue certificates on fair commerce services. The secure downloading process together with trust management and access control then ensure that · each merchant fixes the terms of business in advance, in a non-reputable way, · that each merchant keeps to its own terms during the whole business, and · that services which have not been evaluated by a trusted authority cannot do any harm.
2. Exchange Services:
The Exchange and Transfer Layer provides services for handling and packaging business items as well as transfer and fair exchange of packages. It implements the exchanges of the electronic commerce model. The basic items are electronic payments, credentials, and general statements which includes digital signatures and data. Each type of items is managed by a separate manager which provides unified services integrating existing implementations. The payment manager for example provides three generic services for handling account-based (which includes credit card payments) and cash-like payments together with the negotiation of the means of payment. Several payment systems of each of these classes can be installed. During a payment, the payer and the payee’s payment manager then automatically negotiate which payment system shall be used based on the preferences of the users.
3. Supporting Services
The Supporting Services provide user preference management, persistent object storage, communication, crypto services, and other supporting services such as access control.
1. EUROCOM
is a consulting company offering multimedia courseware in the area of telecommunications. The EUROCOM trial implements online purchases of multimedia courses.
2. FOGRA
is a research organisation of the German printing and publishing industry. They distribute information to their members on a subscription basis and sell consultancy to non-members. The FOGRA trial uses SEMPER for online purchase and processing of subscriptions as well as sales of consultancy.
3. Otto Versand
is one of the largest mail-order retailers world wide. Currently, over 6000 articles can be browsed and ordered on the World-Wide Web. The Otto trial starts with online ordering of goods and may be extended to online ordering and delivery of tickets and other credentials.