E-commerce
Initially, the Internet was designed to be used by government and academic users, but now it is rapidly becoming commercialized. It has on-line "shops", even electronic "shopping malls". Customers, browsing at their computers, can view products, read descriptions, and sometimes even try samples. What they lack is the means to buy from their keyboard, on impulse. They could pay by credit card, transmitting the necessary data by modem; but intercepting messages on the Internet is trivially easy for a smart hacker, so sending a credit-card number in an unscrambled message is inviting trouble. It would be relatively safe to send a credit card number encrypted with a hard-to-break code. That would require either a general adoption across the internet of standard encoding protocols, or the making of prior arrangements between buyers and sellers. Both consumers and merchants could see a windfall if these problems are solved. For merchants, a secure and easily divisible supply of electronic money will motivate more Internet surfers to become on-line shoppers. Electronic money will also make it easier for smaller businesses to achieve a level of automation
Consumers everywhere will want the bounty of a global marketplace, not one that's tied to bankers' hours. Although encryption fortifies our electronic transaction against thieves, there is a cost: The processing overhead of encryption/decryption makes high-volume, low- volume payments prohibitively expensive. We need to resolve four key technology issues before consumers and merchants anoint electric money with the same real and perceived values as our tangible bills and coins. This proves ownership of the currency when it's being spent. Millicent, a division of Digital Equipment, may achieve this goal. Encryption may help make the electric money more secure, but we also need guarantees that no one alters the data--most notably the denomination of the currency--at either end of the transaction. If unchecked, all our transactions, as well as analyses of our spending habits, could eventually reside on the corporate databases of individual companies or in central clearinghouses, like those that now track our credit histories. Everyone who expects to receive a message publishes a key. The bank then sends the authenticated coins back to the consumer, who removes the blinding factor. To send digital cash to someone, you look up the public key and use the algorithm to encrypt the payment. Millicent uses a variation on the digital-check model with decentralized validation at the vendor's server. Electric-money systems must be able to handle high volume at a marginal cost per transaction. One possible implementation of secure hash functions is in a zero-knowledge-proof system, which relies on challenge/response protocols. The fourth technical component in the evolution of electric money is flexibility. Consumers register their credit cards with First Virtual over the phone to eliminate security risks, and from then on, they uses personal identification numbers (PINs) to make purchases.
Common topics in this essay:
Virtual Internet-based,
MIT's Kerberos,
Millicent Scrip,
Initially Internet,
Data Interchange,
Digital Equipment,
Commercial R&D,
Internet Electric-money,
electric money,
spending habits,
secure hash,
,
consumers merchants,
authentication anonymity divisibility,
authentication anonymity,
blinding factor,
hash algorithms,
security authentication,
data packet,
credit card,
security authentication anonymity,
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Acceptance Essays
