CORBA-based pair contracts support system for subjects of electronic commerce

Electronic commerce shall provide a contract support system for its subjects with a credential in distributed computing. The contract support system is a fair exchange system of a package of business items between two parties, a merchant and a buyer. In this paper, based on the CORBA security service specification which OMG defined, we propose the fair contract support system for subjects of electronic commerce, providing the mutual authentication and the label-based authorization. This proposed system, by Kerberos for the authentication and the authenticated key exchange, assures not only the identification of a partner but also the confidence of the origin of the business item for contracts between subjects of electronic commerce. Since our deployed Kerberos is extended to the mutual authentication service based on distributed object space, it is efficient for security administration to manage the information such as key management in the distributed computing.