A Notational Payment Scheme for Mobile e-Commerce

Abstract

Due to its inherent anytime, anyplace, anywhere convenience, mobile communication is believed going to extend the reach of e-commerce into the world of mobility. This paper proposes a notational (credit-based) payment scheme for mobile e-commerce. In our method, we define a subscriber certificate based on ITU-T X.509 recommended attribute certificate as a vehicle mainly for carrying the certificate subject (mobile user) s maximum allowed credit amount. With subscriber certificate, a mobile user can prove his credit to the merchant server while conducting a transaction and the expenditure is added to the mobile user s monthly phone bill without the needs of paying directly to the merchant. We also describe the overall WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) network architecture as well as the application of subscriber certificates in mobile e-commerce transaction procedure. Though WAP can support the public-key cryptographic computation, the main challenge to this approach is a powerful computing capability required by the mobile terminals.