A CORBA based framework for trusted E-commerce transactions

Business via the Internet is becoming very popular. A number of organizations doing business in the traditional way are extending to do business over the World Wide Web. This not only results in reaching a very large number of customers in a cost-effective way but also makes business transactions fast and efficient. Most business-to-business deals are done through value-added networks (VANs) but, for general consumer-to-business deals, the Internet provides a powerful base. However, customer confidence in Internet commerce needs to be further strengthened before large-scale Internet purchasing becomes a reality. In recent years, we have seen the emergence of cryptographic techniques to provide secure transactions, but security alone is not enough, unless the transacting parties also trust each other. Hence, the main ingredient missing is trust. Many attempts have been made to provide secure and trust-providing protocols but few have seen any practical use. In this paper, we show how trust can be provided through a network of trust service providers (TSPs). We provide a set of trust services of a very basic nature which can be deployed through such a network. Our solution is implemented in the form of distributed objects on a CORBA-based platform. The clients accessing the trust services are written as Java applets.