SAFER ELECTRONIC PAYMENT SYSTEM

Entities Involved in the E-Payment System

The entities involved in the SAFER e-payment system under an agent-based SET protocol are shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Entities involved in SAFER e-payment system

Agent butler is shown in Figure 7. In the system, the agent butler, who makes payment using a payment card through the SET protocol, represents the cardholder. The agent butler resides in the user's home PC (or running on a secure host where the user has an account) as a static user agent and has a number of functions pertaining to agent management and e-/m-commerce. The user interacts with the agent butler through the agent butler user interface . The agent butler can dispatch mobile agents to remote commercial hosts using the agent transport module. It receives messages and shopping information from dispatched agents through its agent receptionist . Finally, it carries out transactions and payments through its financing agency .

USER INTERFACE
Agent Butler
Agent Transport	Agent Receptionist	Financing Agency
Mobile Agent		E-commerce Controller	Payment Module

Figure 7: Function modules in the agent butler

The Merchant host (see Figure 8) is an online retailer that is willing to receive and run agents through the shopping server . It possesses product information in a locally accessible database for the agent to access and extract data. Each host runs in an autonomous fashion. It can carry out SET transactions with the agent butler using the purchase server .

Merchant Host
Shopping Server	Purchase & Payment Server

Figure 8: Modules that comprise the merchant host

The certificate authority (Figure 9) is one of the indispensable entities under SAFER. The certificate authority (CA) is the provider of trusted digital certificates. And it runs a registration server to handle SET registration requests from both the cardholder (agent butler) and merchant host. The processing of such requests is handled by the authentication and certification module.

Certificate Authority
Registration Server	Authentication & Certification

Figure 9: Modules in CA

The payment gateway (Figure 10) is similar to the CA. It runs a payment server waiting to handle SET payment authorization or capture requests from the merchant. When such requests arrive , the payment processor module processes the request.

Payment Gateway
Payment Server	Payment Processor

Figure 10: Modules in payment gateway