e-Commerce security — A life cycle approach

The rapid evolution of computing and communication technologies and their standardizations have made the boom in e-commerce possible. Lowering of the cost of operation, increase in the speed of transactions, and easy global reach to customers and vendors have been the reasons for the overwhelming popularity of this new way of commerce. This article examines the issues related to the security of the assets and transactions in the e-commerce components and activities. Since large public money is involved in the transactions, the role of information security and privacy is not exaggerated in this kind of business. After examining the technologies used in e-commerce, the article goes on to identify the security requirement of e-commerce systems from perceived threats and vulnerabilities. Then e-commerce security is viewed as an engineering management problem and a life cycle approach is put forward. How the e-commerce systems can be made secure using the life cycle approach is outlined. The relevant standards and laws are also discussed in the perspective of e-commerce. The article closes with some future research directions and conclusions.