Ticket-based mobile commerce system and its implementation

Abstract

Security is a critical issue in mobile commerce, especially in mobile database systems since mobile environments are dynamic and traditional protection mechanisms do not work very well in such environments. Mobile database access usually across multiple service domains, traditional access mechanisms rely on the concept of starting home location and cross domain authentication using roaming agreements. However, the cross domain authentications involve many complicated authentication activities when the roam path is long. This limits the future mobile applications. This paper presents a solution for all kinds of mobile services through short message service (SMS) systems and a ticket-based service access model that allows anonymous service usage in mobile applications. A service provider can avoid roaming to multiple service domains, only contacting the Credential Centre in the model to check a user's certification. The user can preserve anonymity and read a clear record of charges in the Credential Centre at anytime, and the identity of misbehaving users can be revealed by a Trusted Centre. Furthermore, the solution has been demonstrated by the implementation with SMS and RS232.