A formal specification and performance evaluation of the purchase phase in the SET protocol

This paper reports the formal specification and performance evaluation of a phase in the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET), an e-commerce protocol by Visa and MasterCard. We focus on the purchase phase which is modelled by means of a True Concurrency Timed Process Algebra (BTC), which takes into account the number of resources that the system has at its disposal. Here, we extend its syntax with the intention of representing what actions use the shared resources and how many resources the system has at its disposal. We then give a performance evaluation of this model where some interesting results are presented.