ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET), a protocol designed to secure bank card transactions initiated on open networks. SET was sponsored jointly by Visa and MasterCard in collaboration with important players in business software such as IBM, GTE, Microsoft, SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), Terisa Systems, and VeriSign (SET specification, 1997). 1 Secure Electronic Transaction LLC (SETCo) was responsible for maintaining the specifications, for conformance and interoperability testing, and for issuing licensing agreements. Despite this impressive list of promoters, the market opted TLS/SSL rather than SET. From a technical point of view, however, the study of SET is still worthwhile because it introduced many innovations that could be reutilized in the future.
