Internet Secure Payments Protocol
charter-ietf-ispp-01
Document | Charter | Internet Secure Payments Protocol WG (ispp) | |
---|---|---|---|
Title | Internet Secure Payments Protocol | ||
Last updated | 1997-01-01 | ||
State | Approved | ||
WG | State | Concluded | |
IESG | Responsible AD | (None) | |
Charter edit AD | (None) | ||
Send notices to | (None) |
Draft Charter 11/1/95 mw
The Internet is increasingly being used for the conduct of commerce,
much of which requires special data structures and protocols for exchanges
among commerce participants. Internet commerce is new. This working group
represents an initial effort at Internet standards for payment transactions for
retail commerce, allowing authentication of the agreement to pay by systems
which holds accounts for the payer and payee, such as payment cards and
related instruments.
For concreteness, we use the terminology of the payment cards industry. The
parties which participate in a card payment are the cardholder,
merchant, acquirer and issuer, and in many cases, payment systems in
which the acquirer and issuer participate. The main direct interactions
at the time of purchase are between cardholder and merchant, merchant
and acquirer, and acquirer and issuer.
The focus of this working group will be on Internet-based protocols to
support the cardholder/merchant and merchant/acquirer interactions.
Non-cryptographic security mechanisms, such as e-mail callback loop,
may be used, when appropriate, to provide authentication.
Strong cryptography may be used, where appropriate, to provide authentication
and protect payment related details (only) from eavesdropping and/or
tampering. However, in order to minimize export, import and use restrictions
on the protocol, an objective of this group would be to limit or avoid the
use of strong encryption, while keeping other goals such as migration from
existing systems. We note that some designs have obtained permission to
export from the U.S. government, and it is expected that similar
permission to import, export and/or use such implementations could be
obtained from other governments.
The payment protocols will not make any assumptions regarding the
security, reliability or temporal characteristics of the underlying
media or protocols used to transmit the payment related information.
Where appropriate, existing protocols and data-representations that
meet the above criteria will be utilized and possibly extended . The
payment protocol will provide and support linkages with other protocols
related to electronic commerce, including for example price presentation,
order confirmation and status, delivery notifications and the like.
Depending on circumstances, one or more of the parties may interact
with a payment server gateway which translates between the
Internet specification to be defined here and whatever protocol is
already in use locally. The use of payment server gateways is likely
to be the most common means for acquirers to connect to the Internet
and use this protocol, but other variations may occur as well.
The working group shall first focus on four documents. The first document
will be an architecture for an account-based payment protocol; the second
document will describe the message formats; and the two additional documents
will describe Web and e-mail based implementations, including any
necessary extensions to existing protocols and standards (e.g. HTML).
Consideration will also be given to debit cards and other related
instruments, and to the embedding of the same concepts in other transports.