A secure e-transaction model for e-commerce

Electronic commerce is an Internet-based business transactions performed electronically by individuals, companies, corporations and governments utilizing information and communication technologies. The most important obstacle to further expansion for e-commerce has been the lack of adequate security protections. When sending secure data via the Web, four items, no provided by Internet, are needed: confidentiality, Integrity, Authentication, and non-repudiability. This paper describes them, briefly summarizes some relevant cryptographic technologies and proposes a novel cryptographic-based model to support a secure e-commerce. More precisely, our proposed model uses XML combined with cryptographic techniques to create a secure session between partners in which the traffic between the partners is encrypted and only the adequate participants can decrypt it, to transmit structured data across the Web and to further improve the security of the exchanged documents.