The quick tour: a summary of approaches

RELease 1.0, Jan 24, 1995

To oversimplify: An account holder submits a digitally signed withdrawal note to her bank with the note information scrambled. The bank verifies that its customer signed it, removes that signature and applies its own, which certifies that the resulting message now has transferable value. But the bank can't trace the note and does not know where it is spent because of the blinding factors. DigiCash's technology operates on a minimal-need-to-know basis, with trusted virtual intermediaries that monitor and confirm steps along the way. In this way, value gets transferred and people get paid (verifiably), but nobody knows who did what to whom.

The ecash system can be implemented in software. In fact, one million dollars of ecash are in circulation now as part of DigiCash's first operational pilot project. That money is cleared by DigiCash's First Digital Bank. DigiCash is working on a large-scale system that relies on smart-card technology, which in turn requires an infrastructure of readers and portable electronic wallets, so people can know how much money they have on hand. Chaum holds several important cryptography patents. Servers and services

Netscape Communications, formerly Mosaic Communications, recently struck a deal with MasterCard, which gives it a link to a major transaction system, expected to be operational by mid-year. Netscape is already working with First Data Corp., Bank of America and First Interstate. Netscape's browser has been licensed by many large companies, most notably MCI, which will use it as part of its internetMCI offering. Netscape has also made its client software easily available for free to non-commercial users, who can also pay $29 to register, which entitles them to support and upgrades. The company is trying to seed broad use of its protocols in order to grow the server market - and set de facto standards.

Netscape's developers embedded encryption and validation in the Netsite Commerce Server software. Users who log in with Netscape's client software, or other clients that use the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol Netscape developed, can access the server's transaction functionality. Netscape licenses the technology openly, and has proposed it to the World Wide Web Organization as a standard. If users try to do transactions with non-compliant browsers, the system warns them that their transactions may not be secure. Netscape developed the SSL protocol using RSA encryption; the protocol authenticates the server as well as encrypting transmissions. Enterprise Integration Technologies (EIT) has developed a secure Web protocol that uses RSA encryption called S-HTTP (Secure HyperText Transfer Protocol), which several major developers support.(1) The two protocols are not compatible, though they could be used together.

Open Market's goal is to help companies set up and manage "storefronts" on the World Vide Web as automatically as possible - on Open Market's electronic mall or in environments of their own. Open Market's StoreBuilder kit, currently available only on the Internet, leads merchants elegantly through the steps of creating an electronic storefront on the Internet. it includes layouts for catalogs of items for sale, advertising pages and indices. StoreBuilder is a bit like paint-by-numbers, but it is effective in its completeness and allows companies to create custom experiences more quickly. StoreBuilder will eventually be available as a shrinkwrapped package for companies that have no Internet access at all.