Stamatis Karnouskos

Mobile payment: A journey through existing procedures and standardization initiatives

It is predicted that mobile applications will become an integral part of our lives at the personal and professional level. Mobile payment (MP) is a promising and exciting domain that has been rapidly developing recently, and although it can still be considered in its infancy, great hope is put on it. If MP efforts succeed, they will boost both e- and m-commerce and may be the killer service in 2.5 G and beyond future ambient intelligence infrastructures. This article introduces the mobile payment arena and describes some of the most important mobile payment procedures and consortia that are relevant to the development of mobile payment services. The aim of this work is to introduce the reader to mobile payments, present current concepts and the motivation behind it, and provide an overview of past and current efforts as well as standardization initiatives that guide this rapidly evolving domain.

A roadmap for research in mobile business

Mobile business research has arguably grown to become one of the most topical and complex eBusiness research areas in recent years. As a result, researchers face a plethora of interdisciplinary research challenges. Understanding the range of these challenges and confronting them requires coordinated research efforts, backed up by a holistic guiding approach. This paper aims at contributing to the future of mobile business research by proposing a roadmap to systematise and guide future research efforts, providing a methodical outlook to open research issues across all dimensions defining mobile business and prioritises future research in each dimension in the form of short-, medium-, and long-term research challenges.

SEMOPS: design of a new payment service

One of the most promising future applications in the domain of mCommerce is the mobile payment. Different approaches come to the market and try to address existing needs, but up to day no global solution exists. In this paper we take an insight on the SEMOPS project, analyze some of the requirements that have been its guiding force as well as the business model it supports.

Using a privilege management infrastructure for secure web-based e-health applications

Within the European HARP project, the HARP Cross Security Platform (HCSP) has been specified to design and to implement trustworthy distributed applications for health over the open Internet enabling both communication and application security services. Certified servlets composed and attributed according to the users authorisation create certified and signed XML messages. From those messages, user-role-related applets are generated. The HCSP consists of a client environment, web server, an application server, as well as a database server and an archive server. The needed Privilege Management Infrastructure (PMI) has been established by an Attribute Authority and a policy server. The HCSP components are distributed installed over all countries involved. The role-based authorization has been defined according to the policy deploying the users attribute certificates. The HARP solution has been practically implemented for a Clinical Study demonstrator.

Realization of a secure active and programmable network infrastructure via mobile agent technology

The deployment of sophisticated telecommunication services poses demanding design and implementation challenges to the underlying infrastructure. The end-goal of more flexibility, fault tolerance, quality of services, intelligence, component-based service integration, service personalization, programmability, openness and of course security in a heterogeneous infrastructure can be reasonably achieved via active and programmable networks. In this paper, we first investigate an integrated architecture for active and programmable network infrastructures that is based on mobile agent technology. Subsequently we present a security architecture for our node and comment on its functionality and technology choices made. At the end a dynamic VPN deployment with nomadic user support scenario is analyzed in order to argue about the pros and cons offered by this approach.

SEMOPS: Paying with Mobile Personal Devices

The growth of mobile commerce is directly related to the increase of ownership and use of mobile personal, programmable communication devices, including mobile phones and PDAs. These devices provide effective authorisation and management of payment and banking transactions since they are capable of offering security and convenience advantages compared with existing methods, such as credit/debit card transactions and online payments through a PC. Some of these advantages are part of the existing devices’ functionality while others require modest, inexpensive enhancements likely to be incorporated in the mobile devices to come. It is expected that the use of secure and convenient mobile personal devices can revolutionise the payment, banking and investment industries worldwide. This paper presents SEMOPS, a secure mobile payment service implemented on innovative technological solutions and introducing a competitive business enabler of mobile commerce. SEMOPS intends to exploit the business opportunities inherent in the billing, customer-service, technical relationships and banking services among mobile customers, mobile operators and banks in order to offer a competitive solution to existing payment services.