15 Visa, MasterCard SET for EC Thanks to CertCo, Spyrus

Imagine the Internet as Niagara Falls. Breathtaking, but not all that useful. Electronic commerce then becomes the generator, a way to harness what has become, to some, a wonder of the world.

Making the generator work has been difficult because consumers don't trust the Internet. In early 1997, Visa and MasterCard's Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol brought forth a solution combining software, digital certificates and encryption as the answer to the call for more security. Central to the first U.S. SET transactions conducted in June was the May deal that joined MasterCard and Visa with software supplier CertCo and hardware vendor Spyrus to create a security infrastructure that enables SET.

The benefits: increased security for the private root key underlying digital certificates. "The technology enabled us to be able to split the key fragments for the root key for SET into multiple parts and have a higher degree of security as far as risk management," says Visa's Stephen Herz, svp of Internet Commerce. Sharing private keys makes the card companies equal partners. "This has provided a distributed trust mechanism that has been powerful and dealt with the organizational hierarchy issues," says CertCo svp Charles Walton.

More to the point, says Forrester analyst David Weisman, "Without this, you wouldn't be able to get SET off the ground." R.Sausner

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