SECURED WEBPORTAL FOR ONLINE SHOPPING

ABSTRACT

An online shopping system permits a customer to submit online orders for items and/or services from a store. A Web Portal acts as a gateway to the internet. Web portals provide a single point of access to a variety of content and core services, and ideally offer a single sign-on point.

The main challenge for online shopping portals is to provide security for the transactions involved. Customers, usually need to enter their crucial information such as, credit card number, debit card number etc. to buy products. Today, most of the shopping portals make use of Secured Socket Layer (SSL) to transfer crucial data. Existing system was capable of providing a very good end-to-end security. But, it cannot encrypt only a part of information; hence a large cipher text is generated.

To, address the issues not considered by the current system, a new system is proposed here, which makes use of XML encryption to provide security. XML Encryption is intended to provide security for transactions by generating a compact cipher text, which is transferred over the net as an XML document.

In the project work  the development of secured web portal is undertaken. Online shopping portals are a new face of our real time market hence must be designed in a creative but simple manner so that it is easy for the users to transact from it. There is a need to analyze this new “player” by applying the XML encryption technique which provides end-to-end security for applications that require secure exchange of structured data.

INTRODUCTION

1.1 E-Commerce

“Commerce refers to the all activities surrounding the purchase or sale of goods or services.” The various activities include Marketing, Sales, Payment, Fulfillment and customer service these activities applies to the business done on the web. E-Commerce refers to the process of buying or selling a product or service over an electronic network i.e. an Internet.

E-Commerce encompasses three types of business transactions.

1. B2C E- Commerce: This type can occur between a business and consumer. Example: A business that engages between B2C E-Commerce is ‘Amazon’. Amazon promotes itself as the “place to find and discover anything a user wants to buy online” i.e. by selling videos, books, CDs to the consumer.

2. B2B E-Commerce: This type can occur between one business and another business. Example: a company that engages in B2B IS Cisco system. Cisco system creates much of the physical    infrastructure of the internet that allows businesses to communicate.

3. C2C E-Commerce: This type can occur between two consumers. Example: this type of   E-Commerce is eBay. eBay enables its customers to auction items to other customers. eBay collects fee from every transaction.

E-commerce Architectural Diagram

Database: This acts as a storage container that holds information about the items
that merchants sell (products, prices, manufacturers, etc.)

Shopping Web Site:  This is a web site that enables to modify the information in the database (update prices, add new items, delete old items, etc.)

Public Web Site:  This is the web site that displays and describes merchant’s products to the customers. From this web site merchandise can be securely purchased by anyone in the world.

Step 1:  In the diagram above, Step 1 shows the arrow flowing out of the database into a shopping web site. In other words, all of the information about the products, prices, manufacturers, etc will be displayed in easy to read lists inside the web browser. User can access these lists from anywhere in the world, not just from inside his office.

Step 2:  This step shows the arrow flowing from the shopping web site into the database. As mentioned in Step 1, products information is displayed in the form of lists inside the web browser. Each individual item, on each list is editable. That means that merchants can change prices, add new items, and delete old items, etc from anywhere in the world.  All of merchants "updates" to these lists are instantly stored in the database. This functionality empowers merchants to administer their own web site allowing them to avoid web site maintenance fees and service time when all they want to do is make a change to their product line.

Step 3:  The final step shows the information that merchants have stored in database flowing into the Public web site. With all editing complete, merchants have the confidence in knowing that their customers are seeing accurate and up to the minute products and price information.

1.2 Trends in Online Shopping

Online shopping trend is rising every where for the past many years and is becoming a necessity in the day to day life of the people nowadays. The trend started few years back and today online shopping is quite popular. More and more websites are promoting products online and offer household products at the competitive prices .All kinds of products whether household or lifestyle are available online and more and more people are looking more towards online shopping to fulfill their daily needs.

Online shopping including social shopping trends have shown a better inclination of people towards this latest shopping trend. Through social shopping people can inquire with other users about the product usage and quality. Online Shopping has started a new way to shop, where there is no need for spending your precious time on asking for quality and configuration of products and also wandering for places in search of better brands and their offered prices. The most popular of all products in online shopping are the gift products that are attractively presented and nicely priced .Through interactive social shopping all the products are discussed and their usefulness is witnessed among majority of users .

The online shopping trend is most common in the high end Indian cities where people are learned and are earning well. In small cities very few people are aware of Internet usage while others remain isolated completely. India is blessed with the power of Internet, which has promoted the trend of online shopping to a larger extent. Social shopping network has made shopping well organized and wonderful way to shop.

1.3 Inclination Towards Online Shopping

Online shopping is a type of electronic commerce used for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions. It is a more effective way of getting products to people and spreading into different demographics. It offers some of the advantages such as Convenience, Information and reviews, Price and selection etc.

1. Convenience: Online stores are usually available 24 hours a day, and many consumers have Internet access both at work and at home. Searching or browsing an online catalog can be faster than browsing the aisles of a physical store.

2. Information and reviews: Online stores must describe products for sale with text, photos, and multimedia files, whereas in a physical retail store, the actual product and the manufacturer's packaging will be available for direct inspection.

3. Price and selection: shopping online is being able to quickly seek out deals for items or services with many different vendors. Search engines and online price comparison services can be used to look up sellers of a particular product or service.

Online shopping offers some of the disadvantages they are

1.  Lack of personal interaction, tangibility factor: In real world shopping, we can actually touch, feel or sense different product or picture with different means, but for online shopping we can only view the electronic catalogues this problems has been rectified to certain extent by use of 3D product catalogues

2. Shipping cost: If the shipping cost is more than that of actually carry the product home, then online shopping become unattractive.

3. Online security: shopping online should have to take additional care about credit cards so that to protect from unauthorized usage.

4. Real world shopping experience: Online shopping lacks the real world shopping experience that we get shopping with relatives and friends offline.

SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATION

5.1   Software Engineering Approach

The model used for the development of this software is waterfall model or software life cycle. They are,

• Requirement Analysis and definition

The system’s services, constraints and goals are established by consultation with system users. They are then defined in detail and serve as a system specification.

• System and software design

The systems design process partitions requirements to either hardware or software systems. It establishes overall system architecture. Software design involves identifying and describing the fundamental software system abstraction and their relationships

• Implementation and unit testing

During this stage the software design is realized as a set of programs or program units. Unit testing involves verifying that each unit meets its specification.

• Integration and System testing

The individual program unit or program are integrated and tested as a complete system to ensure that the system requirements have been met. After testing the software system is delivered to the customer

• Operation and Maintenance

Normally (although not necessarily) this is the longest life cycle phase. The system is installed and put into practical use. Maintenance involves correcting errors which were not discovered in earlier stages of the life cycle, improving the implementation of the system units and enhancing the system’s services as new requirements are discovered.

5.2 Software Requirement Specification

The Software Requirements Specification(SRS) provides an overview of the entire SRS with purpose, scope, definitions and Abrevations of the SRS. The aim of this document is to gather and analyze and give an in-depth insight of the complete software system by defining the problem statement in detail. it also concentrates on the capabilities required by stakeholders and their needs while defining high-level product features. The detailed requirements of the entities are provided in this document.

Introduction

This document provides details about the entire software requirements specification for the software e-shopping a  database for online shopping centre.

Purpose

The purpose of this project is to provide easy shopping facility online  and easy selling facility to the merchants of all categories.

Definitions and Abbreviations

1. Customer     : The person who purchases the product
2. Merchant      : The person/dealer/company who sell the product
3. Service Provider: It acts as “Trusted Third Party” .

The requirement engineering process can be separated as user requirements to means high level abstract requirements and system requirements to means the detailed description of what the system should do.

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE SCOPE

The main principle of this project is to provide security for online transactions. This project makes use of XML Encryption to secure the transactions. XML encryption tries to overcome the limitations of earlier system. It can encrypt only a part of the file. Only the crucial information such as credit card number is encrypted leaving the rest of the file as it is. Hence, it is a combination of secure and non-secure encryption. It effectively reduces the overhead involved in encrypting the whole file.

The encryption and decryption here is performed using the functionalities provided by java and XML language is used for transferring the encrypted data. Properties of XML and java allow full compatibility with large installed base of secure web servers, extensibility and flexibility.

Currently the system treats the entered credit card numbers if they are in the right format as valid and proceeds further. But, a list of invalid and fraudulent credit card lists should be maintained to avoid misuse of the crucial information.

The encrypted XML may be compressed to further reduce the size of the cipher text which makes efficient use of the network bandwidth. The compression of encrypted XML can be added as the future scope.