Ray Van Eng (09/26/97)
Verifone's vPOS, vGate and vWallet components of their electronic commerce software will run on servers from Hewlett-Packard, the parent company of Verifone. Turkey is said to be one of the fastest growing countries for payment cards in Europe and the Garanti Bank ranks second in the world in terms of profit on capital and fourth in terms of returns on assets. -------------------------------------------------
Investors can access the Treasury Department's Bureau of Public Debt web site through a restricted online link and pay for the bonds and federal surplus merchandise with a Mellon Bank Mastercard payment card. Security is ensured with the use of SET and a GTE issued Cybertrust digital certificate. ------------------------------------------------- Entrust plans to make its public key infrastructure (PKI) software to support the SET protocol. The PKI software was originally designed to let companies issue their own digital certificates to employees, customers and partners for secure connection to private corporate networks protected behind firewalls. The new SET support will allow a Entrust customer like Scotiabank in Canada to become a service bureau to license SET compliant digital certificates to consumers, web stores, Internet service providers so that they could all engage in secure Internet shopping activities. Entrust is a spin-off from Nortel, Canada's pre-eminent telecommunication equipment manufacturer. -------------------------------------------------- SET 1.0 as released earlier this year is not perfect, some say far from it. The "processing overhead" of SET has been regarded by many as excessive. For example, SET executes six RSA public key encryption operations per transaction while SSL (Secure Socket Layer) performs only one. This could seriously impede the performance of a web server, causing long delays for frustrated online shoppers, and leading to a potential loss of business for the Internet merchant. As a result, planned improvements to the SET specification include the use of a more efficient encryption algorithm such as Certicom's Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC), a Canadian technology which is reputed to be ten times faster than the RSA scheme incorporated in SET 1.0. Words from Visa and Mastercard is that SET 2.0 is in the works. Smart card integration and debit card features are on the menu. In light of this, the ECC becomes an even more important factor in any future development of the SET protocol for use with units that are low in memory and processing power such as smart cards, cellular phones, tv set top boxes etc. |
In
cooperation with a number of technology partners, the U.S. Treasury is
making the U.S. savings bond available for purchase over the Internet.