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Schlagwörter:
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Zusammenfassung:
Payment protocols for electronic commerce have traditionally been studied
mostly by the cryptography, security, and distributed computing communities.
However, as pointed out by this invited paper, the database-style notion of
atomicity is of crucial importance for such protocols as well and has been
neglected so far. In fact, one could argue that keeping distributed data
consistent in the presence of server failures is an absolutely critical concern
in electronic commerce, whereas perfect protection against tampering, albeit
highly desirable, is not the most pressing issue given that a decent suite of
security measures is already in place. In fact, being billed for some goods
that one has never received or accidentally receiving some ordered goods twice
may turn out to be as troublesome as a stolen credit card number.
Using atomic transactions for the distributed processing across multiple
servers on behalf of the merchant, the bank, and the customer is, of course,
state of the art in the database community. Regardless of the fact that many
deployed e-commerce solutions may exhibit severe engineering deficiencies in
this regard, adding distributed transactions does by itself not pose any
research challenges. Rather, it is the combination of payment protocols and
transactional protocols that needs to be studied carefully. For example, to
what extent do protocols for anonymous payment and atomic commit influence each
other?
This paper provides an excellent overview of the issues in this contemporary
area where payment and transactional protocols need to be reconciled. It points
out a variety of open problems and research opportunities in the intersection
of these two avenues (beyond merely emphasizing the need for atomic
transactions in electronic commerce). I highly recommend reading this paper and
particularly its Section 7 on open problems to everybody doing research on
electronic commerce.
