A method for validating frequently revised specifications having open parts

SET (Secure Electronic Transactions) is a credit payment protocol on the Internet. The SET specification has open parts in order to flexibly cope with various users' business requirements. Security requirements are also a kind of business requirements. Due to such open parts of the SET specification, the currently provided "compliance test" is not sufficient for assuring interoperability, though this test can verify whether the implementation of products complies with the SET specification. However, the ideal "interoperability test" is not practical. Thus, an informal but practical validation method, called a "step-wise prototyping method", is proposed to solve these problems through prototyping for various business applications. This method can validate the interoperability of products complying with the SET specification, or it can validate the SET specification itself, through a supplementary "compliance test". As a conclusion, the validation of business protocols on the Internet, such as SET, whose specification is frequently revised and has a large degree of open parts, has a serious problem which needs to be solved. Our proposed method can give a solution to that problem.