A Scheme for Anonymous Electronic Commerce Using Secure Intelligent Trade Agents

In the last years, the exponential growth of computer networks has created an incredibly large ooer of products and services in the net. Such a huge amount of information makes it impossible for a single person to analyze all the existing ooers of a product on the net and decide which of them ts better her requirements. This problem is solved with the intelligent trade agents (ITA), which are programs that have the ability to roam a network, collect business-related data and use them to make decisions to buy goods on their owners' behalf. Known ITA systems do not provide anonymity in transactions and require an on-line trusted third party. We present a new scheme for an intelligent trade agent system allowing anonymous electronic transactions with an oo-line trusted third party.