Secure Multicast for Mobile Commerce Applications

Worldwide, more than 1/3 of all e-commerce transactions in business-to-consumer industries are nowadays executed via mobile devices (Criteo, 2015). Despite its increasing importance, it can be noted that mobile commerce does not seem to “take-off” equally across diverse goods and services contexts. We observe, for instance, that mobile commerce is quite common in service industries for purchasing tickets (e.g., for flights, public transportation, and sport events), while it is less common for services such as financial products. Balasubramanian et al. (2002) addressed this issue and proposed that contexts of m-commerce differ from each other with regard to several characteristics. For example, they propose that location sensitivity (among other characteristics) differs for various m-commerce applications, and that this characteristic may impact acceptance of m-commerce across industries. It may be that acceptance of m-commerce is higher in some industries since use of location sensitive data is appreciated by customers, while it is not valued in other purchasing contexts. Against this background, we propose that examining (1) risk perception related to mobile commerce and (2) different types of mobile commerce applications are essential for gaining a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of differing relevance of m-commerce across industries. In particular, our study acknowledges the differential roles of the financial, performance, and security facets of risk. In addition, we assume that the role of value and risk dimensions differs subject to three mobile commerce application characteristics which are location sensitivity, time criticality, and extent of control. Based on a dataset of 800 respondents, results of our models demonstrate that especially security risk can act as a critical inhibitor of acceptance. The extent to which performance risk and financial risk impact perceived usefulness was found to be moderated by the three contextual characteristics. From a managerial perspective, results show which factors should deliberately be considered in the development of m-commerce applications, and in which different application contexts they matter.

With recent advances in devices, middleware, applications and networking infrastructure, the wireless Internet is becoming a reality. We believe that some of the major drivers of the wireless Internet will be emerging mobile applications such as mobile commerce. Although many of these are futuristic, some applications including user-and location-specific mobile advertising, location-based services, and mobile financial services are beginning to be commercialized. Mobile commerce applications present several interesting and complex challenges including location management of products, services, devices, and people. Further, these applications have fairly diverse requirements from the underlying wireless infrastructure in terms of location accuracy, response time, multicast support, transaction frequency and duration, and dependability. Therefore, research is necessary to address these important and complex challenges. In this article, we present an integrated location management architecture to support the diverse location requirements of m-commerce applications. The proposed architecture is capable of supporting a range of location accuracies, wider network coverage, wireless multicast, and infrastructure dependability for m-commerce applications. The proposed architecture can also support several emerging mobile applications. Additionally, several interesting research problems and directions in location management for wireless Internet applications are presented and discussed.

Recent technological advancement has made mobile commerce applications a sustainable business tool due to the capability of providing long-term economic growth without negatively impacting the community’s social, environmental, and cultural aspects. Nonetheless, the attention paid to mobile commerce’s role in facilitating firms’ economic growth among Malaysian entrepreneurs has been barely noticeable. Most entrepreneurs are not convinced to transform their main business channels from conventional to online (mobile) modes due to the lack of financial information and awareness of environmental concerns. Therefore, this study aims to examine the financial performance and mobile transport usage trends of mobile commerce applications. A quantitative research design through an online survey was applied for data collection, with 380 samples were analysed using IBM SPSS Statistic 26. The study found that mobile commerce users (entrepreneurs) agree that there has been an increasing trend in the number of customers, sales revenue, and monthly profit, at 99.2%, 99.1% and 96.6%, respectively. The rising trend in financial performance proves that mobile commerce is vital for a firm’s economic growth. The study also showed that the frequency of mobile transport usage showed a decreasing trend at 27% once the mobile commerce application is actively used among entrepreneurs. The decreasing trend of mobile transport usage can reduce carbon dioxide emissions and minimize individual movement, benefiting the environment and society. Hence, the study can provide invaluable insights to entrepreneurs and escalate their confidence levels in using mobile commerce applications as their primary business channels. Technology engagement in businesses will help entrepreneurs sustain their businesses, spur innovation among sellers, stimulate social benefits, increase the economy, and reduce environmental damage in the long run. In conclusion, mobile commerce is an efficient technological advancement which contributes to firm and country sustainability.

The potential advantages of mobile commerce applications have been discussed extensively in the recent literature, with many industries offering mobile services. Examples from the financial sector include instant funds transfer (mobile banking) and share trading (mobile brokerage). Commuter services such as sending schedule change alerts or using a mobile phone to pay for parking have become widespread. Applications based on the location of the user (e.g., offering mobile coupons to customers in the vicinity of a shop or a restaurant) are also being trialled (Barnes, 2002; Siau, Lim, & Shen, 2001; Varshney, Vetter, & Kalakota, 2000). Despite the potential benefits (for example, improved customer service) mobile commerce applications have not been widely adopted across business sectors. Mobile banking illustrates the point: initially, seen as the “killer application” of mobile commerce (Kannan, Chang, & Whinston, 2001), it has now been termed a “dead end” (Semrau & Kraiss, 2001). It has also been classified as an application which has not yet matured (Mallat, Rooi, & Tuunainen, 2004). However, innovative applications continue to emerge, for example, breaking news alerts (CNN, n.d.), and a mobile tutoring service (Butte, 2004). It has become important therefore to identify the determinants of mobile commerce adoption and the emerging adoption patterns. A significant number of results in this area have been reported in the literature. Recent examples include studies of mobile services adoption in areas characterized by relatively high penetration of mobile devices—such as Denmark (Constantiou, Damsgaard, & Knutsen, 2004), Singapore (Samtani, Leow, Lim, & Goh, 2004), and Finland (Carlsson, Hyvonen, Repo, & Walden, 2005). The identified drivers and inhibitors of mobile commerce adoption can be broadly classified as factors related to mobile infrastructure access, and factors relating to perceived consumer value. This article proposes a mobile commerce reference model which incorporates both infrastructure access and customer value and can be used to formulate research questions related to mobile commerce adoption. The remainder of the article is organized as follows: first, mobile commerce is defined and compared to electronic commerce. The next section introduces a mobile commerce reference model and discusses mobile commerce adoption. The article continues with a review of future trends and a brief conclusion.

Copyright protection is a major issue in online content-distribution services and many key-management schemes have been proposed for protecting content. Key-distribution processes impose large burdens even though the communications bandwidth itself is restricted in the distribution of mobile content provided to millions of users. Mobile devices also have low computational capacities. Thus, a new scheme of key management, where the load on the key-distribution server is optimal and loads on clients are practical, is required for services. Tree-based schemes aim at reducing the load on the server and do not take reducing the load on clients into account. The load on clients is minimized in a star-based scheme, on the other hand, while the load on the server increases in proportion to the number of clients. These structures are far from being scalable. We first discuss a relaxation of conventional security requirements for key-management schemes in this paper and define new requirements to improve the efficiency of the schemes. We next propose the τ-gradual key-management scheme. Our scheme satisfies the new security requirements and loads on the server, and it has far fewer clients than conventional schemes. It uses an intermediate configuration between that of a star- and a tree-structure that allows us to continuously change it by controlling the number of clients in a group, mmax. The scheme can be classified as τ-star-based, τ-tree-based, or τ-intermediate depending on the parameter, mmax. We then present a quantitative evaluation of the load on the server and clients using all our schemes based on practical assumptions. The load on the server and that on clients involves a trade-off with the τ-intermediate scheme. We can construct an optimal key-management structure according to system requirements using our schemes, while maintaining security. We describe a concrete strategy for setting parameter mmax. Finally, we present general parameter settings by which loads on both the server and clients using the τ-intermediate scheme are lower than those using the τ-tree-based scheme.

P2P networks have characteristics of decentralization, autonomy, and dynamicity. The security problems caused by these characteristics have seriously affected further development of P2P networks. The authors did research on CL-PKC key management schemes. (1) They propose a certificateless-based key distribution scheme with multiple trusted centers that fits the characteristics of P2P networks, and analyzed its security. (2) They also propose an improved interactive key agreement protocol across multiple domains, and then compare it with some existing key agreement protocol from aspects of security and computational efficiency. (3) The authors have implemented the proposed key management schemes, then verified their correctness and tested their computational efficiency. Combined with master key share management and key management of nodes, this system constructed a complete certificateless-based key management model, which is an exploration to solve security problems in P2P networks.

An empirical study of mobile commerce in insurance industry: Task–technology fit and individual differences

Up until today, various studies have discussed gamification but none of them have explored how different types of gamification will affect customer satisfaction and loyalty. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the impact of several types of gamification in loyalty programs on customer loyalty in mobile commerce applications (m-commerce). This study covers the types of gamification found in m-commerce applications in Indonesia, including points, tasks/quests, and levels-related gamification. Data collection in this study was carried out through an online questionnaire distributed to users who have used gamified loyalty programs on m-commerce applications in Indonesia. To test the hypothesis, this study uses a covariance-based structural equation modeling method with the help of AMOS 26. The results found that points, tasks/quests, and levels-related gamification significantly affected utilitarian and hedonic values. It was also found that utilitarian value affects satisfaction and loyalty, but hedonic value only affects satisfaction. This study explains the importance of utilitarian values in implementing gamification in loyalty programs and provides insight into the type of gamification that has the most significant influence on customer loyalty, which is levels-related gamification.

In humanware applications, resource constrained sensor devices are tactically placed on human body to form Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). Then the WBAN is used for monitoring biometrics and movements of human body. Keeping in mind the resource constrained devices, WBANs are treated just like wireless sensor networks when considering a solution for key management. However, WBANs differ from traditional wireless sensor networks in scale, topology and security requirements. Also, the WBANs can also use random values from biometric measurements for the generation of keys. These differences render the key management schemes of WSNs inefficient and overly complex for WBANs scenario. Therefore, we propose a key management scheme that is efficient and fulfills the security requirements of WBAN.

Numerous key management schemes have been proposed for sensor networks. The objective of key management is to dynamically establish and maintain secure channels among communicating nodes. Desired features of key management in sensor networks include energy awareness, localized impact of attacks, and scaling to a large number of nodes. A primary challenge is managing the trade-off between providing acceptable levels of security and conserving scarce resources, in particular energy, needed for network operations. Many schemes, referred to as static schemes, have adopted the principle of key predistribution with the underlying assumption of a relatively static short-lived network (node replenishments are rare, and keys outlive the network). An emerging class of schemes, dynamic key management schemes, assumes long-lived networks with more frequent addition of new nodes, thus requiring network rekeying for sustained security and survivability. In this article we present a classification of key management schemes in sensor networks delineating their similarities and differences. We also describe a novel dynamic key management scheme, localized combinatorial keying (LOCK), and compare its security and performance with a representative static key management scheme. Finally, we outline future research directions.

Mobile Commerce (M-Commerce) applications are becoming popular among Arab population. The applications have been considered as a necessity in their life for performing online transactions such as buying goods. For these reasons, it is necessary to build M-Commerce applications that are similar to online websites in terms of its usability and to avoid usability problems which may lead to frustration. In addition, users expect these applications to support their native language; Arabic language adds extra challenges when it comes to designing a usable User Interface (UI). Having a set of heuristics to evaluate Arabic M-Commerce is crucial to these goals. The current heuristics for M-Commerce were developed without considering UI for Arabic M-Commerce applications. This paper presents a set of heuristics for evaluating the UI of Arabic M-Commerce. The presented heuristics are divided into six categories, including: Search and Findability, Visual Design, Translatability, Consistency, User Control and Freedom, and Adaptability. The process of developing the proposed heuristics includes three stages; firstly, generating draft heuristics based on the literature review study, and then the draft was reviewed by three HCI experts, and finally the modified heuristics after expert review were sent out for a final evaluation by a usability expert community. An online survey has been used to collect data from the community. The obtained comments and suggestions from the community were used to finalize the proposed set of heuristics, which are presented in this paper.

Internet of Things-based environments pose various challenges due to their anytime/anywhere computing, and the efficient cryptographic based key management is one of the major challenges in Internet of Things. The key management life cycle consists of initialization, key generation, key registration, key backup, key update, key recovery, and key revocation. Our contribution in this paper is to summarize the state-of-the-art key management schemes and techniques in different scenarios, such as mobile ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, and the Internet of Things environments. Further different issues related specifically to the Internet of Things environment are discussed and the causes and effects pertaining to the security breach for Internet of Things are identified. Furthermore, in this research work, we develop a novel permutation of threshold and identity-based key management schemes for the Internet of Things environment and have proposed future directions to counteract the attacks on confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and availability of security services in the Internet of Things environment and identified the two key management schemes, that is, identity and threshold schemes for Internet of Things, to resolve Internet of Things key management issues and maximum possible security services effective implementation. We evaluate our scheme with the help of mathematical and statistical techniques.

WiMAX security has two goals, one is to provide privacy across the wireless network and the other is to provide access control to the network. The security sub-layer of IEEE 802.16 employs an authenticated client/server key management protocol in which the BS, the server, controls the distribution of keying material to the client SS. This paper analyzes the physical layer threat and MAC layer threat of WiMAX, then lists the security requirements of a WiMAX system. Furthermore, we propose the security architecture of WiMAX and the key management scheme from the aspects of authorization key (AK) exchange, TEK exchange and AK management. In conclusion, this paper gives the security issues and countermeasures in WiMAX system.

This chapter extends the discussion of dynamic secrets from the secure communication between Alice and Bob to the cryptographic key management in a large scale networked environment. The deployment cost, the management complexity, and the scalability issues are addressed. Specifically, this chapter chooses the smart grid as the application scenario to explore the practicality of the key management scheme based on dynamic secrets. Smart grid is an emerging infrastructure and the directions have been changing constantly. In this chapter we make a primitive proposal for certain aspects of smart grid security assuming wide use of wireless communication devices. The smart grid is a vital integration of the traditional power grid and a communication network that enables real time information sharing and control across the grid. The communication capability among grid devices enables higher power utilization efficiency for the smart grid than the traditional power grids. However, it is challenging to architect a secure communication infrastructure to protect the smart grid from cyber-physical security threats. One major challenge is to design an efficient, scalable cryptographic key management scheme (KMS) for smart grid communication networks. A smart grid can contain millions of nodes in its communication network. These nodes can be remotely scattered, even in areas where the accessibility is severely limited, e.g. in a high latitude region where snow blocks the access road to some smart grid nodes in winter months. Such a network environment is unlike that found in typical computer network. A KMS designed for a traditional computer network will encounter performance hurdles or even be infeasible when directly applied to a smart grid communication network. This chapter presents a dynamic key management scheme (DKMS) as a lightweight, scalable key management solution for the smart grid communication network.

In this paper, new concept of value proposition for m-commerce is set up based on the study on previous value propositions for m-commerce, and clustering a great number of m-commerce applications by 4 sectors. These 4-sector applications are evaluated by 17 detail propositions. Then these propositions are reorganized structurally by factor analysis, of which result can be used point for drawing perceptual map. This paper identifies the degree of importance in respective propositions through experimental analysis. These experimental analyses are able to hold up objectivity of research methods, and suggest multi-points of view. This result can be used for setting up m-commerce strategy. The implications of this paper are providing diagnostic information to design a new applications or devices. And concretizing value propositions for m-commerce make a operators clear in their decisionmaking