Web Commerce Security Design and Development

Who Should Read This Book
The primary audience for this book are architects and developers, systems
engineers, project managers, senior technical managers, corporate strategists,
and technical marketing staff.
The ideal reader for this book would be a systems architect or a developer
who requires technical understanding of how to design and implement a secure
e-commerce or m-commerce solution that satisfies the consumers’ needs. The
reader should have moderate knowledge of security technologies, vulnerabil-
ity assessment and threat analysis, transactional and scalable systems design,
development, maintenance, as well as payment and commerce systems. No
special tools are needed.

Summary
To talk about the profound impact that the Internet, the Web, and e-commerce
have had on our everyday lives is stating the obvious. Personal computers,
mobile phones, and other consumer electronic devices are gatekeepers of our
interactions with the digital world: They are entrusted to be the de facto means
to live our digital life. As a result of using our mobile devices to conduct busi-
ness transactions, m-commerce is accelerating our dependence on the Web.
Visiting the front page of an e-commerce site (that is, the first page that you see
when you browse to www.ebay.com for instance) and logging in to your account
is considered to be a very simple action; however, making this process secure
and reliable is anything but.
Our digital security almost entirely depends on the security of our computers,
mobile devices, and all the systems that they communicate with: This is a very
complex setup. We all need reliable security, therefore it is of utmost importance
to put in place secure processes to satisfy this need and protect our confidential
information. From the system designers’ vantage point, the task of securing such
a complex system is overwhelming, to say the least. There are different parts
of this ecosystem that need to operate in synchrony, although many of them
were not originally designed to work together. From the end users’ perspective,
however, the need is much simpler; it must be easy, safe, and secure to use the
system! In this book we will describe what it means to make e-commerce and
m-commerce systems secure and thus safe for consumers to use.