Research on Online Transaction Protocols for Supporting Credit/ Debit Card Transaction

The increase of wireless devices, offering connectivity and convenience, continues to exert marvelous demands on merchants to deploy secure wireless applications including electronic commerce. One key element, which would help them in fulfilling this requirement, is a standard protocol for supporting both electronic credit card and debit card transactions over wireless networks. Although the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol offers end-to-end security for credit card transactions over a wired infrastructure, there are several factors including bandwidth requirements which make it unsuitable for wireless applications. This paper presents the Wireless Payment Protocol (WPP) that supports both credit-card and debit -card transactions using the Wireless Application Protocol’s (WAP) Wireless Transport Layer Security (WTLS) and Smart Card technology. In addition, a brief comparison between SET and WPP is done.