A mechanism for establishing policies for electronic commerce

Information Security for Global Information Infrastructures, 2000

This paper suggests a framework that can be used to identify the security requirements for a specific electronic commerce environment. The first step is to identify all the security requirements applicable to this environment. Next, all participants need to be identified. This is following by breaking down the transactions to different autonomous actions. These actions are then mapped onto the participants involved, which serve as a model for the electronic commerce environment. This information is then used to identify the security requirements for a secure electronic commerce environment. The security requirements, in turn, are then used to develop the security architecture, consisting of appropriate security procedures and mechanisms, and the security policy.

Benchmarking: An International Journal, 2002

The decentralised nature of Web-based information systems demands a careful evaluation of the pantheon of security issues in order to avoid the potential occurrence of business risks that could not be easily mitigated. Understanding that information security is not merely a technical solution implemented at each endpoint of the inter-organizational application, this paper describes an integrated approach based on a rigorous, multi-level and multi-dimensional model. Having as a starting point the overall business goals and objectives, the model drives the development of a strategy from the lower levels of securing data in storage and transition to the higher levels of business processes. Its use and applicability is demonstrated over``Billing Mall''a system for electronic bill presentation and payment.

2006

E-business applications require not only effective security mechanisms but also sufficient system resources to make them fast and reliable. We propose an e-business model that is highly decentralized and robust against attacks. The model is well suited for distributed environments like a Grid and is based on a multi-agent system. This underlying multi-agent system relies upon a fully generic approach called Agent-Oriented Abstraction. This enables to define different needs and requirements of an e-business model that are then assigned to decentralized instances like e.g. an instance supporting contract negotiations. Security features support the agents contributing to this e-business model with regard to legal aspects of their contract negotiations. One such feature is achieved by using so-called agent Alliances. Since an Alliance uses secure multi-party computations an instance that is realized by an Alliance of n agents is robust against up to n/3-corrupted members. The main other characteristics of our model are as follows: corporate knowledge is defined through distributed virtual knowledge owned by the agents, the utility of decisions is assessed through a choice of models and trust is achieved through security and legal validation.

Proceedings 14th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (Cat. No.98EX217), 1998

discuss security requirements which in the past were recognised as being very important for electronic market participants but had only received limited or little attention in the electronic commerce research community.

The eCommerce domain needs more and more automation, speed and security for its cus- tomers. That's why the number of B2B applications handling electronic contracts and digital signatures is still increasing. These ones are based on certiflcates and use secure communication protocols. Nevertheless most of them don't take into account negotiation regarding to contracts clauses and arbitration of potential con∞icts. In the Multi-Agent System (MAS) domain contract notion exists too. Social contracts make social control and management of cooperation between agents possible. This paper will consist in combining notions of electronic contract and social contract in order to integrate agents within an eCommerce platform for the automation and au- tonomous negotiation of electronic contracts terms. We experiment our proposal in the context of secure eBusiness application trading intangible assets where we consider a speciflc business case related to the translation sector.

Decision Support Systems, 2000

Existing electronic markets in the open network Internet often show a lack of security and fairness. New forms of trading are just coming up and the variety of different market structures and digital goods we will probably see in the future is yet unthinkable.

Journal of Management and Sustainability, 2012

Law was brought into practice since the inception of humankind on the planet. The importance of law in human life is unquestioned. Civilization operates under commandments, from inception to demise and its implementation is mandatory for constraint of human behaviors in various different situations. Since transgressions to law can vary in there occurrence, crimes committed on-line are of no exception, and therefore constitutes a need for regulation, required to make on-line transactions efficient and without disturbance. In reality, online lawful transactions, under law, are arduous due to difference in locations and accordingly in legal litigations. In such circumstances, friction arises due to in-existing suitable systems in such circumstances. But with the induction of e-laws can yield better results for consumer-vendor protection and also for on-line transactions, it will yield better results.

Proceedings 15th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC'99)

Among other areas electronic commerce includes the fields of electronic markets and workflow management. Workflow management systems are usually used to specify and manage inter-and intra-organisational business processes. Although workflow management techniques are capable to specify and conduct at least parts of market transactions, these techniques are not or very rarely used for this purpose yet. In both fields users demand security and integrity to protect for example their privacy, their property rights or digital payments. To satisfy these security demands a variety of existing security services, mechanisms, protocols, and organisational measures are existent and may be used. At one hand side, to encourage using these techniques it is necessary to have a tool which enables a firm's executive to formulate market transactions security demands at a high abstraction level. On the other hand executing market transactions needs a more formal, machine readable description of the transaction and its security requirements. In this paper we present a methodology to specify secure protocols, which are usable to automatically conduct business processes as well as market transactions.

Sadhana, 2005

There has been enormous increase in transactions and cooperativecomputing services on the internet. This is both a technical and a social phenomenon. Transactions and services over the internet have global reach and users, known or unknown to the service provider, might be interested in availing access or participating in the cooperative transaction in a distributed manner. Thus, it is very important for service providers to identify and establish trustworthiness of potential collaborators, which they do by writing contracts (e.g. access control, security policies; the words contract and policy are used interchangeably) without violating the privacy and confidentiality laws that prevail across geographical boundaries. But as the system becomes complex and dynamic, contractual incompleteness arises since it becomes cumbersome to mention potentially large set of outcomes of the user's choice of action. Trust plays a crucial role in the design of optimal contracts; not all the relevant, valuable information on the user's choice of action is incorporated in the equilibrium contract. It may also be noted in that traditional transactions, the notion of seeing is believing plays a vital role. However, in e-transactions, this is not the case. The challenge is to see how in such a scenario trust can indeed be generated. Note that the presence of trust facilitates cooperative behaviour and allows for exchange to occur in situations where its absence would preclude trade. In this paper, we shall present a comparative analysis of various approaches of trust management in practice that integrates technology with other factors. We shall also bring out the relative deficiencies and how these issues are tackled in our ongoing work that facilitates execution of optimal contracts.

2006

We present specifications and provable protocol, for secure ordering and provision of digital goods and services. Notably, our protocol includes fully automated resolution of disputes between providers and customers. Disputes may involve the timely receipt of orders and goods, due to communication failures and malicious faults, as well as disputes of fitness of goods and order. The protocol and specifications are modular, with precise yet general-purpose interfaces. This allows usage as an underlying service to different ecommerce scenarios and applications, in particular secure online banking and brokerage. The protocol is practical, efficient, reliable and secure, under realistic failure and delay conditions. Our design and specifications are a part of a layered architecture for secure e-commerce applications .