A distributed and interoperable object-oriented support for safe e-commerce transactions

Business via Internet is becoming popular. A number of organizations doing business in the traditional way are extending themselves to do business over the Web. Most business-to-business dealings are done through Value Added Networks but for general consumer-to-business dealings, the Internet provides a powerful base. However, customer confidence in Internet commerce needs to be further strengthened before large scale Internet purchasing and selling becomes a reality. While security standards have been established through efficient cryptographic techniques to ensure that network communications are not intercepted, the lack of trust between the endpoint parties involved in an e-commerce transaction remains an obstacle for a smooth completion of the transaction. This is because transacting parties need to trust each other before making any commitment. In this paper, we show how trust can be provided automatically through a network of Trust Service Providers (TSP). The solution we propose allows both customers and merchants to deal with each other confidently through trusted intermediaries which role is to guarantee the goods delivery to the customer and the payment to the merchant for issuing those goods. The transactions are conducted atomically and transparently. That is, a transaction process does not experience any off-line transition delay at the intermediaries and the transacting parties deal virtually directly with each other. This solution requires building a trust web based on a network of TSPs, which we implemented in the form of distributed CORBA objects.