Security Issues in M-Commerce: A Usage-Based Taxonomy

M–commerce is a new area arising from the marriage of electronic commerce with emerging mobile and pervasive computing technology. The newness of this area—and the rapidness with which it is emerging—makes it difficult to analyze the technological problems that m–commerce introduces—and, in particular, the security and privacy issues. This situation is not good, since history has shown that security is very difficult to retro–fit into deployed technology, and pervasive m– commerce promises (threatens?) to permeate and transform even more aspects of life than e–commerce and the Internet has. In this paper, we try to begin to rectify this situation: we offer a preliminary taxonomy that unifies many proposed m–commerce usage scenarios into a single framework, and then use this framework to analyze security issues.