Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) is a financial industry innovation designed to increase consumer and merchant confidence in electronic commerce. Backed by major credit card companies, MasterCard and Visa, SET is designed to offer a high level of security for Web-based financial transactions. SET should reduce consumers' fears of purchasing over the Web and increase use of credit cards for electronic shopping. A proposed revision, due in 1999, will extend SET to support business-to-business transactions, such as inventory payments.
Visa and MasterCard founded SET as a joint venture on February 1, 1996. They realized that in order to promote electronic commerce, consumers and merchants would need a secure, reliable payment system. In addition, credit card issuers sought the protection of more advanced anti-fraud measures. American Express has subsequently joined the venture.
SET is based on cryptography and digital certificates. Public-key cryptography ensures message confidentiality between parties in a financial transaction. Digital certificates uniquely identify the parties to a transaction. They are issued by banks or clearinghouses and kept in registries so that authenticated users can look up other users' public keys.
Think of a digital certificate as an electronic credit card. It contains a person's name, a serial number, expiration date, a copy of the certificate holder's public key (used for encrypting and decrypting messages and verifying digital signatures), and the digital signature of the certificate-issuing authority so that a recipient can verify that the certificate is real. A digital signature is used to guarantee a message sender's identity.
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