Predicting the Performance of Transactional Electronic Commerce Protocols

As security practitioners, there is a tendency to neglect performance issues. The Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol is proposed as the transactional electronic commerce protocol of choice, yet it has been criticised for its complexity and denseness. This paper reports on a performance analysis of SET conducted through the development of a queueing model. The purpose of modelling SET was to predict its performance and determine which stages in the protocol are likely bottlenecks and points for optimisation when doing SET implementations. Results reveal that existing infrastructures will generally suffice for SET, financial network authorization delay directly affects performance and that transaction times are strongly dependent on the merchant and gateway processing time.