An Improvement to the Set Protocol Based on Signcryption

Electronic commerce, as exemplified by the popularity of the Internet, is becoming more important along with fast progress in communications and information technology. The SET (Secure Electronic Transaction) protocol is a scheme designed to ensure that merchants and cardholders can conduct business over a public network. Although the SET protocol has some disadvantages, but still it is the most commonly used protocol in the Internet shopping. Signcryption is a cryptographic primitive which simultaneously provides both confidentiality and authenticity in a single logical step. Signcryption based on elliptic curves provides the same level of security using smaller keys compared to schemes based on the discrete logarithm problem over finite fields. This paper examines the benefits of using signcryption rather than signaturethen-encryption in the SET protocol. Using identity-based signcryption in the SET protocol reduces the number of encryption and decryption operations. Moreover, signcryption is less time consuming than signature-then-encryption.