Research claims SET is past its sell-by date

Jupiter Communications last week advised vendors of ecommerce software not to support Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) - the online security protocol pioneered by Visa and MasterCard.

The research body claims even in a best-case scenario, SET would fail to infiltrate the market, and would be used for less than 10 per cent of all online transactions by the year 2002. The report advises merchants to stick with SSL (secure sockets layer).

Brian Morris, head of ecommerce at MasterCard, disagreed. "The problem with SSL is that it doesn't authenticate who the sender is, and nor does it confirm the sender's relationship with the bank," he said. "SSL only encrypts the data."

The principal analyst at Jupiter who conducted the research, Dave Restrepo, hit back. "He is right in saying that SET does more than SSL, but we don't think you need SET's additional services to secure online commerce. There are negligible cases of fraud in online sales, and as the market grows, they will not increase, because the sophisticated users are already online."

Restrepo did concede that when it comes to digital products - such as software and electronic books - fraud is a problem for consumers using SSL. But he believes the market will adapt SSL to solve the problem.