Critical Review of B2B Commerce PKI Trust Topologies

As more and more companies conduct business with each other over the Internet, interoperable trust frameworks become important. For many businesses, trust provision is a critical issue in commencing B2B commerce transactional services. Communication over the Internet is by default open and uncontrolled and conflicts with the business needs of digital business. Privacy, confidentiality and integrity of business transactions are problems for the Internet if no additional security layers are implemented. Current developments include use of IPv6, the new Internet Pro tocol, which incorporates authentication and encryption in the lower part of the network layers. In addition there are PKI applications like digital certificates and digital signatures and other common uses of PKI in S/MIME, PGP, SSL, etc. Online B2B marketplaces are now beginning to play a very important role in business to business commerce. Businesses and governments are increasingly depending on them, with a growing number of potential users. Payment security fraud techniques like spoofing, sniffing, content alteration and denial are emerging and the need for security is getting more and more important. This paper critically reviews various topologies adopted by national and international trust providers for their Public Key Infrastructures used to p rotect high value transactions and messages transported across multiple untrusted networks.