trip report from the tenth World Wide Web conference in hong kong

afternoon tutorial

secure e-payments (TP4):

speaker: weidong kou & william song, university of hong kong

attendees: 25

introduction:

the three phases of e-commerce:

negotiation
payment
fulfillment/delivery

traditional payment methods:

cash
credit card
check

e-payment methods:

e-cash (or digital cash):
important properties are: security, anonymousness, portability, transferability, divisibility, infinite duration, usability, unit-of-value
e-check (or digital check):
based on digital signature, secure, fast, easy to process
on-line credit payment:
customer - agent - merchant relationship (agent settles payment between customer's and merchant's bank)
CyberCash credit services:
analog to physical world credit card (requires authorization)
customer side wallet:
stores client's credit card information in an encrypted file. bound to a particular PC, vulnerable to attacks and loss due to hardware failure.
micro payment:
transaction value below USD 0.25. transaction cost must be less than the actual payment !
SET (Secure Electronic Transaction)
developed by MasterCard and VISA, supported by IBM, Microsoft, Netscape, VeriSign and others. still no breakthrough yet.

my comment:

nothing new ... we are still waiting for the break through of SET - or an alternate payment method ... and there is still no practical solution for the micro payment issue.

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production note:

this trip report was written on a Vadem Clio C-1050 running Windows CE with Pocket Word. It was then transferred to a DELL Latitude notebook and modified as needed. this document is supposed to be HTML V4.0 compliant.