Secure and auditable agent-based e-marketplace framework for mobile users

Mobile agent based e-marketplace auction trading requires a secure and auditable system with a solid framework to support it. In investigating the requirements, it transpired that there is a lack of such a standardised framework. While mobility helps in avoiding network latency, particularly in increasing fairness in applications with bounded response times such as trading of auctions, it nevertheless raises issues concerning security, privacy and trust in protecting personal confidential information, managing and regulating legitimate trading and payment processing. These issues are of paramount importance and must be taken into consideration when designing a framework for modelling an auditable e-marketplace for mobile users. This also implies that there is also an underlying need to provide mobile users with simple, transparent and unobtrusive user interface. This paper proposes a framework that accommodates these requirements through protocol scenarios and highlight further research work that need to be performed. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.