Some remarks concerning the security of online transactions based on NetBill ecommerce protocol

Abstract

The development of the Internet has a great impact on the promoting and selling of the ordinary or digital goods. It allows the creation of new online commercial schemes, which are characterized by a very fast access to economical information. All of these require exchanges of documents in digital form between several firms, organizations and/or physical persons. Besides its advantages, the transactions on the Internet leads to major security problems because the information may be available to unauthorized parties. It is necessary to develop, maintain and analyze specific security solutions dedicated to digital transactions. Thus, several e-commerce, epayment, e-auction protocols have been proposed in order to assure proper and secure transactions. The main dificulty is that the information flow on the Internet is free, without any control or censorship. Moreover, the identity of the involved partners is not always known. This implies that the information can be intercepted, modified or even deleted by dishonest users. In this paper we analyze a very important e-commerce protocol, namely NetBill, in the context of on-line transactions.