REMOVAL OF CERTIFICATES FROM SET PROTOCOL USING CERTIFICATELESS PUBLIC KEY CRYPTOGRAPHY

Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) is a standard e-commerce protocol for securing credit card transactions over insecure networks. In a transaction using SET, all the members need public key certificates in order to authenticate their public key. Certificates are created by certificate authorities (CAs), The process of getting certificates from a certificate authority(CA) for any SET participants involves a large number of procedures like sending request to issue a certificates, getting approval or rejection of request and finally obtain the certificates, which is essentially time consuming as because these are associated with certificate management, including renew, revocation ,storage and distribution and the computational cost of certificate verification, also the chain of verification can be quite long, depending on the certificate hierarchy. So, the issues associated with certificate management are quite complex and costly.The present paper attempts the removal of the certificates using the ‘certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC)’ . The basic idea of CL-PKC is to generate a public/private key pair for a user by using a master key of a Key Generation Center (KGC) with a random secret value selected by the user. Hence, CL-PKC eliminates the use of certificates in traditional PKC and solves the key escrow problem in ID-PKC.The comparison with existing SET implementation is also addressed in the paper that shows the effectiveness of the proposal.