Agents and Payment Systems in E-Commerce

Author(s):  
Sheng-Uei Guan

An emerging outcome of the popularization of the Internet are electronic commerce and payment systems, which present great opportunities for businesses, reduce transaction costs, and provide faster transaction times. More research has been conducted with new technologies like mobile Internet used by business models (Baek & Hong, 2003). However, before using the Internet, it is essential to provide security in transferring monetary value over the Internet. A number of protocols have been proposed for these secure payment systems, including NetBill, NetCheque, Open Market, iKP, Millicent, SET (Sherift, 1998), E-Cash (Brands, 1995), NetCash, CAFÉ (Mjolsnes, 1997), EMV cards (Khu-Smith & Mitchell, 2002), etc. These systems are designed to meet diverse requirements, each with particular attributes. Automation and intelligence is another issue that poses challenges in the development of e-commerce. Agent technology has been incorporated into the area of e-commerce to provide automation and intelligence for the e-trade process. An agent is a software program capable of accomplishing tasks autonomously on behalf of its user. Agents must provide trustworthy consistency and fault tolerance to avoid eavesdropping and fraud. Also, agents should have roaming capability so as to extend their capability well beyond the limitations of owners’ computers. To meet these requirements, this chapter will discuss some related components under the SAFER (Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution, and Roaming) architecture (Zhu & Guan, 2000) and propose an agent-based payment scheme for SAFER. Different types of electronic payment systems have been developed to meet its diverse requirements, which generally include integrity, authorization, confidentiality, availability, and reliability for security requirements (Asokan, 1997). Payment systems can be classified in a variety of ways according to their characteristics (Dahab & Ferreira, 1998), such as the exchange model (cash-like, check-like, or hybrid), central authority contact (online or offline), hardware requirements (specific or general), payment amounts (micropayment), etc. Among the available payment schemes in the market, E-Cash is one of the best in terms of security, flexibility, and full anonymity. E-Cash is a cash-like online system that uses electronic coins as tokens. E-Cash has unique advantages, such as flexibility, integrity, and full anonymity that cannot be found in electronic check and credit card based systems. It uses cryptographic techniques to provide full anonymity. The agent-based payment scheme for SAFER adopts some similar principles and concepts of E-Cash.

2009 ◽  
pp. 822-828
Author(s):  
Sheng-Uei Guan

An emerging outcome of the popularization of the Internet is the electronic commerce and payment systems, which present great opportunities for businesses, reduce transaction costs, and provide faster transaction time. Research has been conducted with new technologies, like mobile Internet used by business models (Baek & Hong, 2003). However, before using the Internet, it is essential to provide security in transferring monetary value over the Internet. Quite a number of protocols have been proposed for these secure payment systems, including NetBill, NetCheque, Open Market, iKP, Millicent, SET (Sherift & Serhrouchni, 1998), ECash (Brands, 1995), NetCash, CAFÉ (Mjolsnes & Michelson, 1997), EMV cards (Khu-Smith & Mitchell, 2002), and so forth. These systems are designed to meet diverse requirements, each with particular attributes. Automation and intelligence is another issue that poses challenges in the development of e-commerce. Agent technology has been incorporated into the area of e-commerce to provide automation and intelligence for the e-trade process. Agent is a software program, which is capable of accomplishing tasks autonomously on behalf of its user. Agents must provide highly trustworthy consistency and fault tolerance to avoid eavesdropping and fraud. Also, they should have roaming capability so as to extend their capabilities well beyond the limitations of owners’ computers. This article will discuss some related components under the Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution, and Roaming (SAFER) architecture (Guan & Hua, 2003; Guan & Yang, 2004; Guan & Zhu, 2002; Ng, Guan, & Zhu, 2002; Zhu, Guan, Yang, & Ko, 2000) and propose an agent-based payment scheme for SAFER. Different types of electronic payment systems have been developed to meet their diverse requirements, which generally include integrity, authorization, confidentiality, availability, and reliability for security requirements (Asokan & Johnson, 1997). Payment systems can be classi- fied in a variety of ways according to their characteristics (Dahab & Ferreira, 1998), such as the exchange model (cash like, check like or hybrid), central authority contact (online or offline), hardware requirements (specific or general), payment amount (micropayment), and so forth. Among all the available payment schemes in the market, e-cash is one of the best in terms of security, flexibility, and full anonymity. E-cash is a cash-like online system that uses electronic coins as tokens. E-cash has its unique advantages, such as flexibility, integrity, and full anonymity that cannot be found in electronic check and credit card-based systems. It uses cryptographic techniques to provide full anonymity. The agent based payment scheme for SAFER adopts some similar principles and concepts of e-cash.


Author(s):  
Sheng-Uei Guan

In emerging outcome of the popularization of the Internet is the electronic commerce and payment systems, which present great opportunities for businesses, reduce transaction costs, and provide faster transaction time. Research has been conducted with new technologies, like mobile Internet used by business models (Baek & Hong, 2003). However, before using the Internet, it is essential to provide security in transferring monetary value over the Internet. Quite a number of protocols have been proposed for these secure payment systems, including NetBill, NetCheque, Open Market, iKP, Millicent, SET (Sherift & Serhrouchni, 1998), E-Cash (Brands, 1995), NetCash, CAFÉ (Mjolsnes & Michelson, 1997), EMV cards (Khu-Smith & Mitchell, 2002), and so forth. These systems are designed to meet diverse requirements, each with particular attributes. Automation and intelligence is another issue that poses challenges in the development of e-commerce. Agent technology has been incorporated into the area of e-commerce to provide automation and intelligence for the e-trade process. Agent is a software program, which is capable of accomplishing tasks autonomously on behalf of its user. Agents must provide highly trustworthy consistency and fault tolerance to avoid eavesdropping and fraud. Also, they should have roaming capability so as to extend their capabilities well beyond the limitations of owners’ computers. This article will discuss some related components under the Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution, and Roaming (SAFER) architecture (Guan & Hua, 2003; Guan & Yang, 2004; Guan & Zhu, 2002; Ng, Guan, & Zhu, 2002; Zhu, Guan, Yang, & Ko, 2000) and propose an agent-based payment scheme for SAFER. Different types of electronic payment systems have been developed to meet their diverse requirements, which generally include integrity, authorization, confidentiality, availability, and reliability for security requirements (Asokan & Johnson, 1997). Payment systems can be classified in a variety of ways according to their characteristics (Dahab & Ferreira, 1998), such as the exchange model (cash like, check like or hybrid), central authority contact (online or offline), hardware requirements (specific or general), payment amount (micropayment), and so forth. Among all the available payment schemes in the market, e-cash is one of the best in terms of security, flexibility, and full anonymity. E-cash is a cash-like online system that uses electronic coins as tokens. E-cash has its unique advantages, such as flexibility, integrity, and full anonymity that cannot be found in electronic check and credit card-based systems. It uses cryptographic techniques to provide full anonymity. The agent based payment scheme for SAFER adopts some similar principles and concepts of e-cash.


Author(s):  
Sheng-Uei Guan

An emerging outcome of the popularization of the Internet are electronic commerce and payment systems, which present great opportunities for businesses, reduce transaction costs, and provide faster transaction times. More research has been conducted with new technologies like mobile Internet used by business models (Baek & Hong, 2003). However, before using the Internet, it is essential to provide security in transferring monetary value over the Internet. A number of protocols have been proposed for these secure payment systems, including NetBill, NetCheque, Open Market, iKP, Millicent, SET (Sherift, 1998), E-Cash (Brands, 1995), NetCash, CAFÉ (Mjolsnes, 1997), EMV cards (Khu-Smith & Mitchell, 2002), etc. These systems are designed to meet diverse requirements, each with particular attributes.


Author(s):  
Sathya Rao ◽  
Eric Mannie-Corbisier ◽  
Leszek Siwik

The way of life has changed with the introduction of information and communication technologies (ICT) in every one’s day to day activities and the business. As ICT technologies are constantly evolving, many people attribute the success of enterprises to the ways they deploy and take advantage of new technologies, not only to make their operations more efficient but most importantly to refine and adopt new effective and adaptive business models. Since the advent of the Internet and the very first Internet service providers (ISP) in operation, the traditional ISP market has been in constant evolution due to the gradual globalisation and commoditisation of ISP services. Deregulation and ICT policies have fostered competition (e.g., unbundling of the local loop and so forth) as well. The Internet is as an important channel of interaction inside and/or outside enterprises. The essence of the Internet is conducting business and running of business processes over data communication networks based on nonproprietary standards (Porter, 2001). The World Wide Web as a portal represents a major electronic business (e-business) platform accessed through communication channels provisioned by network and service providers (such as ISDN, DSL, WLAN, UMTS, etc.). There are many challenging aspects of the e-Business that must be considered for a sustainable business of an ISP (Petrie et al., 2004).


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1192-1203
Author(s):  
Dragos Tohanean ◽  
Anca Vasilescu

Abstract Information technology has massively transformed the world of business over the past fifty years - first individual functional areas within companies (“first wave”), later increasingly also cross-divisional value-added processes and trade (“second wave”). Those companies that recognized the tremendous economic potential of these upheavals and consistently adapted, profited enormously - many others, however, fell dramatically. At the same time, innovative startups emerged that successfully created and occupied new markets. With the Internet of Things (IoT), the third digital wave is currently rolling up. Their impact will be enormous - both for our everyday lives and for many industries that have so far been largely spared the disruptive power of digital transformation. Accordingly, the challenges facing most companies today are: understanding more complex competition, acquiring new digital technologies, making existing offerings smart, developing new services, networking production, efficiently analyzing vast amounts of data, and building viable organizations to push all this forward. The IoT is a driver for digitization. By analyzing machine data, the use of sensors and the intelligent real-time processing of huge amounts of data in the cloud, new business models are created. With the information gained, companies are able to improve their value chain. However, one of the most difficult issues in this context for many companies is how they can further develop their existing business model or establish successful new business models that will be based on new technologies and IoT. To investigate resulting impacts, we draw on the existing business models and deduct specifics for the Internet of Things. Building on this, in order to reach the aims of the paper the authors will use a descriptive research method and a case study in order to present how new business models work with the IoT.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 1003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jose Ramon Saura ◽  
Pedro Palos-Sanchez ◽  
Beatriz Rodríguez Herráez

In recent years, digital marketing has transformed the way in which companies communicate with their customers around the world. The increase in the use of social networks and how users communicate with companies on the Internet has given rise to new business models based on the bidirectionality of communication between companies and Internet users. Digital marketing, new business models, online advertising campaigns, and other digital strategies have gathered user opinions and comments through this new online channel. In this way, companies have started to see the digital ecosystem as not only their present, but also as their future. From this long-term perspective, companies are concerned about sustainability and the growth of their business models. There are new business models on the Internet that support social causes, new platforms aimed at supporting social and sustainable projects, and digital advertising campaigns promoting sustainability. The overarching aim of this Special Issue was to analyze the development of these new strategies as well as their influence on the sustainability of digital marketing strategies. Therefore, we aimed to analyze how companies adopt these new technologies in a digital environment that is increasingly concerned with the sustainability of business models and actions on the Internet.


Author(s):  
Giancarlo Fortino ◽  
Alfredo Garro ◽  
Wilma Russo

The Internet offers a unique opportunity for e-commerce to take central stage in the rapidly growing online economy. With the advent of the Web, the first generation of business-to-consumer (B2C) applications was developed and deployed. Classical examples include virtual shops, on-demand delivery of contents, and e-travel agency. Another facet of e-commerce is represented by business-to-business (B2B), which can have even more dramatic economic implications since it far exceeds B2C in both the volume of transactions and rate of growth. Examples of B2B applications include procurement, customer relationship management (CRM), billing, accounting, human resources, supply chain, and manufacturing (Medjahed, Benatallah, Bouguettaya, Ngu, & Elmagarmid, 2003). Although the currently available Web-based and object-oriented technologies are well-suited for developing and supporting e-commerce services, new infrastructures are needed to achieve a higher degree of intelligence and automation of e-commerce services. Such a new generation of e-commerce services can be effectively developed and provided by combining the emerging agent paradigm and technology with new Web-based standards such as ebXML (2005). Agents have already been demonstrated to retain the potential for fully supporting the development lifecycle of large-scale software systems which require complex interactions between autonomous distributed components (Luck, McBurney, & Preist, 2004). In particular, e-commerce has been one of the traditional arenas for agent technology (Sierra & Dignum, 2001). Agent-mediated e-commerce (AMEC) is concerned with providing agent-based solutions which support different stages of the trading processes in e-commerce, including needs identification, product brokering, merchant brokering, contract negotiation and agreement, payment and delivery, and service and evaluation. In addition, the mobility characteristic of peculiar agents (a.k.a. mobile agents), which allows them to move across the nodes of a networked environment, can further extend the support offered by the agents by featuring advanced e-commerce solutions such as location-aware shopping, mobile and networked comparison shopping, mobile auction bidding, and mobile contract negotiation (Kowalczyk, Ulieru, & Unland, 2003; Maes, Guttman, & Moukas, 1999). To date, several agent- and mobile agent-based e-commerce applications and systems have been developed which allow for the creation of complex e-marketplaces—that is, e-commerce environments which offer buyers and sellers new channels and business models for trading goods and services over the Internet. However, the growing complexity of agent-based marketplaces demands for proper methodologies and tools supporting the validation, evaluation, and comparison of: (1) models, mechanisms, policies, and protocols of the agents involved in such e-marketplaces; and (2) aspects concerned with the overall complex dynamics of the e-marketplaces. The use of such methodologies and tools can actually provide the twofold advantage of: 1. analyzing existing e-marketplaces to identify the best reusable solutions and/or identify hidden pitfalls for reverse engineering purposes; and 2. analyzing new models of e-marketplaces before their actual implementation and deployment to identify, a priori, the best solutions, thus saving reverse engineering efforts. This article presents an overview of an approach to the modeling and analysis of agent-based e-marketplaces (Fortino, Garro, & Russo, 2004a, 2005). The approach centers on a Statecharts-based development process for agent-based applications and systems (Fortino, Russo, & Zimeo, 2004b) and on a discrete event simulation framework for mobile and multi-agent systems (MAS) (Fortino et al, 2004a). A case study modeling and analyzing a real consumer-driven e-commerce service system based on mobile agents within an agent-based e-marketplace on the Internet (Bredin, Kotz, & Rus, 1998; Wang, Tan, & Ren, 2002) is also described to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.


2010 ◽  
pp. 834-842
Author(s):  
Chi Po Cheong

Credit card is the most popular payment method used in Internet shopping. The idea of credit card payment is to buy first and pay later. The cardholder can pay at the end of the statement cycle or they can pay interest on the outstanding balance. Therefore, there are many credit card-based electronic payment systems (EPSs) that have been developed to facilitate the purchase of goods and services over the Internet such as CyberCash (VeriSign), iKP (Bellare, Garary, Hauser, et al, 1995), SET (Visa and MasterCard, 1997), CCT (Li & Zhange, 2004), and so forth. Usually a credit card-based EPS involves five parties: cardholder, merchant, acquirer bank, issuer bank, and financial institution. Internet is an open system and the communication path between each other is insecure. All communications are potentially open for an eavesdropper to read and modify as they pass between the communicating endpoints. Therefore, the payment information transmitted between the cardholder and the merchant through Internet is dangerous without a secure path. SSL (Zeus Technology, 2000) is a good example to secure the communication channel. Besides the issue of insecure communication, there are a number of factors that each participant must consider. For example, merchant concerns about whether the credit card or the cardholder is genuine. There is no way to know the consumer is a genuine cardholder. As a result, the merchant is incurring the increase in losses due to cardholder disputes and frauds. On the other hand, cardholders are worried about the theft of the privacy or sensitive information such as the credit card number. They don’t want any unauthorized usage of their credit cards and any modification to the transaction amount by a third party. These security issues have deterred many potential consumers from purchasing online. Existing credit card-based EPSs solve the problems in many different ways. Some of them use cryptography mechanisms to protect private information. However, they are very complicated, expensive, and tedious (Xianhau, Yuen, Ling, & Lim, 2001). Some EPSs use the Certificate Authority (CA) model to fulfill the authentication, integrity, and nonrepudiation security schemes. However, each participant requires a digital certificate during the payment cycle. These certificates are issued by independent CAs but the implementation and maintenance cost of this model is very high. In addition, the validation steps of Certificate-based systems are very time-consuming processes. It requires access to an online certificate server during the payment process. Moreover, the certificate revocation list is a major disadvantage of the PKI-based certification model (The Internet Engineering Task Force). The cardholder’s certificate also includes some private information such as the cardholder’s name. The requirement of a cardholder’s certificate means software such as e-Wallet is required to be installed on the cardholder’s computer. It is the barrier for the cardholder to use Certificatebased payment systems. To solve this problem, Visa Company has developed a new payment system called Verified by Visa (VbV) (http:www/visa-asia.com/ ap/sea/merchants/productstech/vbv_implementvbv. shtml). However, sensitive information such as credit card number is still passed to the merchant. Therefore, the cardholder is not protected by the system.


Author(s):  
Charles Ess ◽  
Aline shakti Franzke ◽  
Chi Kwok ◽  
Ngai Keung Chan ◽  
Morten Bay ◽  
...  

AoIR and the Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society (JICES) share common interests in critical reflection on the ethical and social dimensions of the internet and internet-facilitated communication, and have begun a collaboration aimed at collecting ethically-focused AoIR conference submissions for presentation and critique at AoIR, with a view towards subsequent publication in a special issue of JICES. This panel collects four papers exploring especially the legal and ethical dimensions of new technologies, including data collection and storage as public goods vis-à-vis central questions of justice (Paper 1, Towards a Political Theory of Data Justice: A Public Good Perspective); critiques from Western and non-Western positions of the utilitarianism otherwise driving the platforms’ business models and rationales (Paper 2, Google and Facebook VS Rawls and Lao-Tsu: How Silicon Valley’s utilitarianism and Confucianism are bad for Internet ethics); basic tensions between the rule of law vis-à-vis algorithmic “decision-making” processes in jurisprudence and “surveillance capitalism” (Paper 3, The Jurisprudence of Datafied Law); and a taxonomy of the ethics of AI, algorithms and big data based on an analysis of 90 guidelines from 2017-2020 (Paper 4, A systematic literature Review of ethical Code of Conducts in the field of Internet Research). These papers directly take up the central interests shared between AoIR and JICES in the ethical and social dimensions of the internet and internet-facilitated communication. They offer new insight on legal and ethical aspects of contemporary technologies, some of which will have specific implications for internet research ethics.


2001 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-147
Author(s):  
Kuo Lane Chen ◽  
Huei Lee ◽  
Bradley W. Mayer

The purpose of this paper is to study the security control techniques and its impact on Internet purchasing and electronic commerce. Various security-control techniques for e-commerce are: (1) authentication (2) encryption (3) electronic payment systems (4) internal security management, and (5) non-electronic payment options. A survey from three universities in three different states was conducted. Results suggest that students have general knowledge about security techniques used by businesses but they are not as familiar with electronic payment systems. Students, however, prefer entering credit card information on the Internet after they decide to purchase a product via the Internet.


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