Building Trust in E-Commerce - Internet Computing, IEEE

Most of us who have purchased items via the Internet have felt reluctant about the transaction at some point — usually when entering our credit card number or receiving unexpected goods. As customers, we need guarantees that the other party will not misuse confidential information, and merchants need guarantees that they will receive payment for the goods delivered. While security protocols such as the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) ensure that a credit card number will not be intercepted during transmission, they provide no guarantee against its misuse by the receiving party, nor against fraud by the transmitting party. To increase confidence in commercial transactions over the Web, where the transacting parties are invisible to each other, we need not just new protocols but also new transaction processes. One solution is to enlist a third party, referred to here as a trust service provider (TSP), to act as an Internet-based intermediary that assumes responsibility for a smooth transaction. The TSP is known and trusted by both customer and merchant and makes purchases on behalf of the one and conveys the goods on behalf of the other. This article describes my proposal for a trust web model based on a distributed search algorithm and a network of trusted intermediaries that can establish a trusted channel through which terminal transacting parties deal virtually directly and risk-free with each other. I have developed a CORBA-based implementation of the trust-path building algorithm and am currently testing its performance. The actual version of the system can be found at http://faculty.uaeu.ac.ae/~atif/ research/ecommerce/ec.html.