It is also being used to provide the better quality of service. Most business transactions involve the payment and settlement process. Electronic payment systems have become necessary to enable the Internet commerce. The requirements of payment transactions include confidentiality, security, integrity, non-repudiation and authentication. One of the main bottlenecks in the growth of E-commerce is lack of suitable payment instrument and corresponding electronic payment system.
When you make an online purchase on the internet, your credit card information is vulnerable to interception by network sniffers. Software that easily recognizes credit card number formats. Several basic security measures are being used to solve the security problems:
- Encrypt (code and scramble) the data passing between the customer and merchant
- Encrypt the data passing between customer and the company authorizing the credit card transaction
- or Take sensitive information offline
For example many companies use the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) security method developed by Netscape Communications that automatically encrypts data passing between your Web browser and a merchant’s server.
However, sensitive information is still venerable to misuse once it’s decrypted (decoded and unscramble) and stored in a merchant’s server. So a digital wallet approach such as the CyberCash payment was developed. In this method, you add security software add-on modules to your Web browse: That enables your browser to encrypt your credit card data in such a way that only the bank that authorizes credit card transactions for the merchant gets to see it. All the merchants is told is whether your credit card transaction is approved or not.
The Secure Electronic Transaction or SET, standard for electronic payment security extends the CyberCash digital wallet approach. In this method, EC software encrypts a digits envelop of digital certificates specifying the payments details for each transaction. SET (Secure Electronic Transaction) has been agreed to by VISA, MasterCard, IBM, Microsoft Network, Netscape and most other industry player.
Therefore, SET is expected to eventually become dominant standard for secure electronic payments in the internet. However, SET has been stalled by the reluctant of companies to incur its increased hardware, software and cost requirement.
Secure Electronic Payments
