Building trust for distributed commerce transactions

The explosive growth of the Internet exposes unprecedented commercial opportunities over the network. The vast computer networks easily bring together customers and vendors who are physically distributed in different continents. Current research in electronic commerce mainly focuses on payment mechanisms. However, the global presence of customers and vendors makes it difficult to build trust among the parties involved in a transaction. We develop systematic mechanisms to address the trust problem in a network commerce environment. We first develop protocols for a single-customer single-vendor case where one customer buys goods from one vendor. Then we derive protocols for more complicated environments such as when a customer wants to buy goods from several vendors as part of a single transaction. Most of our protocols require some trusted third-party to intermediate transactions. However the workload and requirements placed on the trusted third-party vary from the whole goods and payment store-and-forward to very simple book-keepings of encryption keys. Our contributions also include an algorithm to find the optimal trusted agent.