Symbolon---A Novel Concept for Secure E-Commerce

Electronic-banking applications (EBAs) are among the pioneers of electronic-commerce (e-commerce) applications. Like other e-commerce applications, they require sophisticated security mechanisms and intuitive usability so customers put trust in them and therefore use EBAs. Although EBAs have been existing for a long time and their concepts are well understood, current EBAs have severe security and usability restrictions. Also the authors claim that it is necessary to build secure and small e-commerce applications with intuitive usability in order to be able to create complex and still secure ones with good user acceptance. The paper shows the usability and security problems of related technologies and introduces a new approach that is based on asymmetric encryption. The results of the evaluation show that it meets the intended criteria. Finally the work also includes examples that show how this approach can be used to build secure e-business and e-commerce applications while retaining intuitive usability.