This technology is a component of IBM's Firewall product, and is being ported to other IBM platforms. Work done at IBM with Pau-Chen Cheng, Amir Herzberg , and Hugo Krawzcyk . The protocols implement credit card-based transactions between customers and merchants while the existing financial network is used for payment clearing and authorization. The protocols are extensible and can be applied to any account-based payment model, such as debit cards and electronic checks. They are based on careful and minimal use of public-key cryptography and can be implemented in either software or hardware.
Individual protocols differ in both complexity and degree of security.
For this reason, the design and implementation paper below also reports on a number of practical issues arising in the course of implementation and real-world deployment of a secure payment system. The problem had been open since its formulation by Pease, Shostak and Lamport in 1978. In this work, Piotr Berman. We study the general problem of designing algorithms in situations where there is some information about the typical conditions that are encountered when the respective problem is solved. The basic goal is to assure efficient performance in the typical case, while satisfying the correctness requirements in every case.