Abstract:
Current macro-payment systems used by most E-commerce sites are not suitable for high-volume, low-cost transactions, such as charging per-page for web site browsing. These payment technologies suffer from use of heavy-weight encryption technologies and reliance on always on-line authorisation servers. Micro-payment systems offer an alternative strategy of pay-as-you-go charging, even for very low cost, very high-volume charging. However, several different micro-payment schemes exist, not all suitable for all E-commerce uses.
In this thesis, we develop a new protocol called NetPay which is a lightweight, flexible, offline and secure protocol for electronic commerce over the Internet. Netpay is designed to support purchases ranging in value from a few cents to several dollars under large numbers of micro-payments. It is based on decentralized verification of electronic currency at a vendor's server with off-line payment capture. This is performed with a touchstone and index of e-coins that are passed from vendor to vendor.
We describe the NetPay protocol and its properties. We identify a set of requirements for micro-payment systems that use NetPay and customer/NetPay component interactions. We then focus on the key issues of designing three kinds of CORBA-based NetPay systems with an on-line newspaper application and prototyping two of them which include server-side e-wallet and client-side e-wallet NetPay systems. We also describe design and implementation of a set of reusable NetPay components, which enable NetPay components to be seamlessly added to an existing example web application. Various technologies are used to build these systems including J2EE Enterprise Java Bean, Java Server pages, CORBA and database. We have carried out three kinds of evaluations of micro-payment and macro-payment purchasing models for an on-line newspaper application to assess their relative strengths and weaknesses.