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Every distributed system requires a secure environment for its users. Security becomes even more important if users exchange sensitive information and value, across the network. An e-commerce environment is an example of a distributed system in which security is of a high priority. It is important that messages are confidential and tamper proof; users cannot repudiate transactions, and only authorized and properly authenticated users can access resources. These functionalities require proper security layer to provide access and sharing functions between the e-commerce systems and their respective customers. A Distributed Security Management System (DSMS) provides these services/functionalities. The DSMS is a security middleware for e-commerce servers, which coordinates secure communication, access and sharing of resources between the distributed applications, objects, databases and entities that make up the system. It is designed to provide an interface between clients and the databases of the merchants in a secure way, such that authorized clients can retrieve and send information to the system securely. It is required to have high quality and high tolerance for errors since the server is required to be always available continually. It must also have a user-friendly interface and feature set. The DSMS design discussed in this paper provides these requirements using public and private key systems, data encryption standard encryption, log files and a secure hashing algorithm. A prototype of the system was implemented using the Java security platform.

Many organizations now rely on the Web to conduct business. The increasing popularity of the Internet and e-commerce makes online merchants to constantly seek tools/mechanisms that would permit them to attract new and retain old customers. To achieve these two goals, a business should know, as much as possible, about its customers. Customers are the pivot of all businesses. When businesses lack knowledge of their customers, such businesses cannot efficiently develop their marketing activities.

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This paper presents a fuzzy logic framework for evaluating formalisms applicable to specifying electronic com merce systems. We present an evaluation of the Z notation, Unified Modelling Language (UML), Statecharts, Petri nets, and Finite State Machines (FSM) carried out in conjunction with some domain specialists using the evaluation criteria and the fuzzy logic framework developed in this research. L INTRODUCTION E-commerce entails the exchange of goods and services using the Internet. E-commerce has tremendously infl uenced conventional business transactions. E-commerce has grown rapidly, a lot of individuals and organizations now offer e-commerce services. E-commerce transactions are accom plished online over the Internet. Ehikioya [2] emphasizes the need to develop secure, reliable, and error-free e-commerce applications that guarantee the correctness of online trans actions. Ehikioya [2] and Pereira et al. [8] state that ad hoc, informal, and non-rigorous approaches are currently applied in developing e-commerce applications. The use of rigorous formalisms in developing e-commerce applications would eliminate the undesirable effects of using intuitive and ad-hoc techniques and result in reliable applications. Many formalisms that could be used for specifying e-commerce systems exist in the literature. However, none of the existing formalisms has all the required functionalities to completely specify all the components of an e-commerce system. This paper is a part of our overall research efforts towards developing an integrated formalism that will possess the requi site functionalities required to completely specify all the com ponents of an e-commerce system. This paper evaluates Petri nets [9], Statecharts [4]. Finite State Machines (FSMs) [6], the Z notation [10] and Unified Modelling Language (UML) [7].This paper is significant because it presents a fi ne-grained and highly objective evaluation of formalisms for e-commerce systems.Knight et at.[5] experimentally evaluate three formalisms using a nuclear reactor as case study, while Ardis et al. [1] evaluate six formalisms and a programming language for reactive systems using a telephone switching system as a case study. However, this paper differs from [1], [5J because we we adopt a framework based on fuzzy set theory in assessing the formalisms and carry out our evaluation in conjunction with other domain experts/specialists. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II presents the evaluation criteria, the functional requirements and sample specifications of the ordering process in a typical B2C e-commerce scenario written in the five formalisms evaluated, the fuzzy logic framework, and the results of the evaluation. Section III contains the conclusion and provides a roadmap for future work. II. EVALUATIONThis section presents the evaluation criteria, the functional requirements and sample specifi cations of the ordering process in a typical B2C e-commerce scenario written in the fi ve formalisms evaluated, the fuzzy logic framework, a...