Considering the security challenges in consumer-oriented eCommerce

Abstract

Although proven security technologies are available to protect eCommerce transactions, consumers can still face significant challenges if they have low threat awareness or limited technology literacy. This paper considers such challenges, linked to the consumer's understanding and the usability of the security features placed before them. The need to ensure threat awareness is well illustrated by the problem of phishing - a threat that can specifically target eCommerce users, and which explicitly uses their lack of knowledge as a basis for exploitation. Having established a need for protection, the discussion proceeds to consider the barriers posed by security technologies themselves, identifying a range of issues that may specifically be encountered by end-users. Providing a solution to the problems is far from straightforward, but the paper proposes a number of directions in which useful contributions can be made