ITR:Secure Electronic Transactions

Stevens Institute Of Technology, Hoboken NJ

Investigators

Abstract

This project concerns authentication, audit trails, and privacy in secure electronic transactions, with the intended scope encompassing a wide array of daily activities such as banking, on-line shopping, elections, and surveys. Some of these activities are already be based in part on electronic transactions today, but would benefit from better mechanisms for security. Other activities have the potential to be performed electronically given greater confidence in the security infrastructure surrounding electronic transactions. This project develops the design of a concurrent domain-specific language for distributed electronic transactions that will provide more security guarantees and automation of checks than has been previously done in such languages. It proposes an alternative to security based on software packages with dynamic checks, by a type-theory based approach where security guarantees are verified automatically and statically via typechecking, factoring out checks that other approaches perform dynamically for every execution, and performing them only once at compile time. Efforts in these directions are potentially rich in social and economic benefits. Research on secure electronic transactions will directly reduce the incidence of electronic fraud, theft, and forgery, improving the quality and extending the scope of the software available to the general public.