This paper introduces a mechanism for establishing policies for electronic commerce in a uni ed and secure manner. A commercial policy can be viewed as the embodiment of a contract between the principals involved in a certain type of commercial activity, and it may be concerned with such issues as: ensuring that a payment for services is refunded under speci ed circumstances; preventing certi cates representing e-cash from being duplicated; ensuring that credit card numbers are used only for the transaction they are intended for; and, for certain socially sensitive transactions like the purchase of drugs, ensuring auditability by proper authorities. Our mechanism is based on a previously published concept of law-governed interaction. It makes a strict separation between the formal statement of a policy, which we call a law," and the enforcement of this law, which is carried our by a set of policy-independent trusted controllers. A new policy under this scheme is created basically...
Naftaly H. Minsky, Victoria Ungureanu