While e-commerce has experienced meteoric growth recently, security risks have similarly grown in scope and magnitude. Three major factors have driven the security risks in e-commerce: the growing reliance on the electronic medium for a company's core business; the growing complexity of the software systems needed to support e-commerce; and the value of the digital assets brought online to an inherently insecure medium - the Internet. While security has long been a primary concern in e-commerce, privacy has also grown in importance to consumers. Many of the same Internet technologies that make e-commerce possible also make it possible to create detailed profiles of an individual's purchases, to spy on individual Web usage habits, and even to peer into confidential files that reside on an individual's machine. This volume pulls together leading researchers and practitioners in diverse areas of computer science and software engineering to explore their technical innovations to problems in security and privacy in e-commerce.
The information is drawn from selected papers presented at the first Workshop on Security and Privacy in E-Commerce (WSPEC'00) held in Athens, Greece, November 4, 2000. As such, "Recent Advances in E-Commerce Security and Privacy" introduces both practitioners and researchers to innovations in secure and private e-commerce. Practitioners should gain great insight from the case studies, and researchers should learn about state-of-the-art protocols in secure and private e-commerce that will serve as the basis for future innovations in applied e-commerce technologies.