Excerpts

Preface Our entry into the twenty-first century has been accompanied by the emergence of electronic commerce (e-commerce) as both an enabler and a component of business reengineering. E-commerce offers great rewards for all who embrace it. However, it also brings considerable risks for the unwary. While new technologies, with their complexities and explosive adoption rates, can be largely blamed for creating these new risks, new technologies also represent a large part of the solution, in managing and mitigating these risks. The latter technologies include, in particular, digital signatures and public-key cryptography. However, achieving secure electronic commerce requires much more than the mere application of such core technologies. It also depends upon interdependent technological, business, and legal infrastructures that are needed to enable the use of these core technologies on a large scale. Our goal in this book is to describe the ingredients and recipe for making e-commerce secure, with emphasis on the role, practical deployment, and use of these infrastructures. Why have an engineer and a lawyer teamed up to write this book? The answer is that secure e-commerce can only be achieved through a delicate interweaving of technological safeguards and legal controls. The most critical issues cannot be understood by studying either the technological or legal aspects in isolation. Therefore, an effective treatise on this subject must draw on both technological and legal expertise. This book is targeted at a broad audience, including business professionals, information technologists, and lawyersÑanyone who is concerned about the security of e-commerce. Readers are not expected to have substantive technological or legal backgrounds. To make this book valuable to businesspersons, consumers, bankers, product developers, service providers, legal counsel, policymakers, and students alike, we include introductory material to virtually all topics, with a view to bringing all readers up to a base knowledge threshold before addressing the more complex issues. Since the first edition was published, there has been enormous progress in the field of secure e-commerce. While the core technologies have not changed materially, there have been significant advances in software tools and packaging, standards, legislation globally, and experience in applying the technologies described in the first edition to real-world e-commerce. In the standards arena, for example, we have seen the completion and widespread adoption of the S/MIME secure messaging specifications, IPsec virtual private network specifications, and IETF PKIX specifications for public-key infrastructure. Notable legislative activities have included diverse national and state digital signature laws, and the U.S. Federal E-Sign Act. There has also been solid progress on the assessment and accreditation of secure e-commerce infrastructure components, such as certification authorities. These advances have occurred in conjunction with a massive increase in e-commerce deployment generally, in particular, the rapid emergence of business-to-business Internet commerce. Consequently, in this edition we have focused more on those aspects of the field that are proving most important in todayÕs marketplace and that require rigorous analysis to ensure successful deployment. We have written this book with an international audience in mind. However, the reader will observe, especially in our coverage of practices and legal issues, a predominance of coverage from the U.S. perspective. In general, we believe the problems faced globally are much the same as those faced in the United States, so we anticipate that our coverage of problems and progress in the United States will map meaningfully to developments in other nations. If we sometimes fall short in this respect, we apologize to our international colleagues. Excerpted from Secure Electronic Commerce: Building the Infrastructure for Digital Signatures and Encryption by Warwick Ford, Michael S. Baum All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.