Contracts and Conflicts in E-Commerce

E-commerce participants are joining electronic markets with pre-existing requirements concerning the legal, business and privacy contexts in which they formally enter into contracts and transactions. However, both the productivity of and trust in these electronic market environments is limited as current e-commerce protocols for negotiation and contract agreements lack the capability of detecting conflicts in contracts.

The objective of this project is to develop a prototype that will enhance the integrity of electronic markets through the development of a system that will show how logic can represent contractual requirements, and how logic tools can help check these requirements for agreement or conflicts.

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Denial of Service Attacks in Distributed E-Commerce Environments

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks continue to increase in frequency and complexity. These attacks impact e-business productivity and affect user confidence in the security of e-commerce systems.

This project is designed to focus on Distributed DoS (DDOS) attacks that deplete server resources. The research will explore the development and implementation of measures to enable the early detection of DDoS attacks and the effectiveness of measures that will be designed to counter these attacks.

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Enhancing E-Commerce with Intelligent Agents in Collaborative E-Communities

The goal of this project is to design an intelligent agent-based framework for collaborative e-commerce applications that will better enable online shoppers to emulate the social experience of shopping in real space.

Research will be directed towards the development of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture in which a number of geographically dispersed users, including both customers and merchants, can participate. Given the importance of collaboration and community in e-commerce, the architecture to be developed will be founded on both sound technologies and a carefully considered legal infrastructure.

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Policy Specification and Enforcement for E-Commerce Web Sites

User concerns about the privacy of personal information provided to organizations is one of the issues that IBM addresses through its work on the Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language (EPAL), a language designed for the representation of data handling policies and practices within and between privacy-enabled enterprise tools. The goal of this project is to build on EPAL and model privacy policies that are uniquely suited to e-commerce Web sites.

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A Secure Framework for Mobile Users

With the continuing interest in wireless technology and the increasing availability of new wireless products, e-commerce service providers would like to expand their target markets to include mobile users. However, certain security challenges continue to hold back the widespread introduction of these services.

The objective of this research is to develop a security framework in which mobile users and e-commerce service providers can confidently accomplish e-commerce transactions. The research will include an assessment of privacy laws and security regulations relevant to mobile e- commerce applications under development.

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Trusted Process Infomediaries

More and more business processes that provide services to consumers are being moved on-line where data may be shared between networks of cooperating organizations to provide seamless, efficient, responsive services to consumers 24x7. However, the very efficient, dynamic and seamless nature of those increasingly global networks raises concerns as how to protect the privacy of personal data and prevent its misuse.

The objective of this project is to evaluate current laws and technology standards in this area and to develop a prototype of a "trusted process infomediary” agent that can manage access to sensitive data according to rule-based policies, in the context of a complex, distributed electronic business process.

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