Design of the XML Security System for Electronic Commerce Application

The invocation of World Wide Web (www) first triggered mass adoption of the Internet for public access to digital information exchanges across the globe. To get a big market on the Web, a special security infrastructure would need to be put into place transforming the wild-and-woolly Internet into a network with end-to-end protections. XML (extensible Markup Language) is widely accepted as powerful data representation standard for electronic documents, so a security mechanism for XML documents must be provided in the first place to secure electronic commerce over Internet. In this paper the authors design and implement a secure framework that provides XML signature function, XML Element-wise Encryption function, smart card based crypto API library and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) security functions to achieve confidentiality, integrity, message authentication, and/or signer authentication services for XML documents and existing non-XML documents that are exchanged by Internet for E-commerce application.