| Electronic commerce (EC), on the basic of the information technology, has been influencing the face of the world. It's the sample of the New Net Economy. Electronic business, especially trade over the Internet, is the core of the EC. And because of the unseparatability between the trade and the payment, payment over network is also an important part of the EC. So this article devotes to discussing the payment system over network in EC.This dissertation includes three parts.The first part discusses the conception, model and development of the EC. More and more electronic commerce applications are appearing on the Internet and other network. EC reduces the trade expenses, decreases the trade costs, quickens the trade steps and promotes the trade efficiency. EC creates more profit chance for company and more welfare for consumer. EC has four models, includes Business to Business model, Business to Consumer model, Government Service model and Consumer to Consumer model. Each model has some special needs for payment system over network. Now in China EC is in its first step, there still some factors to prevent its development. But we should also notice the immense potential in China, recognize the trend of EC, and bring every positive factor into promoting the EC to a higher grade.The second part discusses the technical components of the EC system, including network technology, secure technology, identification technology and network payment technology.Network is the foundation of the EC. In the early days, some special value added network is often applied in EC, special network has the shortage of high cost and low velocity. So Internet technology becomes the main network technology of EC. Internet covers the whole world with lower cost and higher speed, just meets the needs of EC.There is another important question when developing the EC over public network such as Internet, that is, security. Public network means opening to everyone. TCP/IP (Transfer Control Protocols/Internet Protocols) could lead the strangers to your home when it leads you travelling freely over the Internet. When we trade over the public network, we need to transfer some confidentiality information such as PIN (Personal Identification Number), the account number in a bank, the cipher, etc. The private information should not be revealed to other people. So we have to apply some enhancing security technology to protecting these information. Cryptography is the main solution. It involves scrambling a message so that it is unintelligible to anyone who does not know the key to unscrambling it. Cryptography enables all parties in a trade to ensure privacy of data routed over an unsecured medium such as Internet. The two prevalent forms of computer-based cryptography are secret-key cryptography and public-key cryptography. Use of either assures privacy of the communication. Some protocols use both methods in its encryption process to enhance the effect, such as SET (secure electronic transaction) protocol. Commerce depends upon security, trust and relationships. Electronic commerce over the Internet poses a unique set of security challenges because the parties are often faceless and voiceless, known only to each other through their presence on the network. When the other party is totally unknown, how do we determine whether it is safe to do business? Without secure commerce protection, opportunities for frauds abound. So before business transaction occurs, certain conditions of trust need to be in place and certain protocols are adopted to put them in place. To this end, a Certification Authority, or CA, is built. A CA is a trusted entity that has the primary responsibility of users. Because the users each share a trusted relationship with a common third party---CA, they could implicitly trust each other even though they have not previously established a personal relationship. The function of a CA is to create and distribute digital certificates (digitally signed messages for authenticating the identity of users) for consume... |
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