INTERNET PAYMENTS (IPAY) CHARTER CHAIR(S): Dave Crocker AREA DIRECTOR(S) AREA ADVISOR MAILING LISTS: General Discussion To Subscribe In Body: sub ietf-pay Archive: DESCRIPTION OF WORKING GROUP: The Internet is increasingly being used for the conduct of commerce, much of which requires special protocols for exchanges among commerce participants. Internet commerce is new, and there are many different models and protocols proposed for the passing of payments over open networks, including some by existing card-based payment associations and other consortia. This working group shall develop methods for selecting among such protocols and methods for encapsulating them for transport in various application environments, especially the world wide web and mail. The working group shall also pursue development of a purchase negotiation protocol (offer specification). The parties which participate in the selection and payment process are: * The merchant who fixes the total price and presents acceptable means of payment * The customer who agrees to the price and payment means * The payment system or scheme which facilitates the underlying payment The focus of this working group will be on Internet-based protocols to support the system interactions between customer and merchant and between merchant and payment system. The working group shall have three deliverables: 1. Negotiation of payment scheme and protocol At a minimum this will require: Presentation to the customer of total price and payment options accepted by the merchant, possibly in a trusted manner. Presentation to the merchant of payment choice by the customer, possibly in a trusted manner. These presentations may be influenced by the total price and a reference to the order. Presentation of total price should not be construed to imply item price presentation, and reference to the order should not be construed to imply the actual content of a goods or services order. 2. Transport of the payment messages This will enable carriage of payment-related messages within existing applications services. In particular this covers both "connected" methods such as HTTP, and "off-line" methods such as SMTP. The technical nature of this task is to determing the "wrapping" mechanisms for permitting a payment protocol exchange to be carried within multiple, lower-level transport protocols, such as SMTP and HTTP. Where appropriate, existing protocols and data- representations that meet the above criteria will be utilised and possibly extended. The transport protocols will, where appropriate, provide and support linkages with other protocols related to electronic commerce, such as for price presentation, order confirmation and status, delivery notifications, and the like. 3. Methods for merchant offer of goods and prices This will be an extended topic for the working group, developing techniques for reaching agreement on product price between customer and merchant. The description of goods and services and the associated pricing may be addressed in any order, and need not necessarily be addressed together. The working group's specifications will not make any assumptions regarding the security, reliability or temporal characteristics of the underlying media or protocols used to transmit the payment related information. With respect to security-related mechanisms: Non-cryptographic security mechanisms, such as e-mail callback loop, may be used, when appropriate, to provide authentication. Strong cryptography may be used, where appropriate, to provide authentication and protect payment related details (only) from eavesdropping and/or tampering. In order to minimize export/import and use restrictions on the protocols, an objective of this group is to limit or avoid the use of strong encryption, while keeping other goals such as migration from existing systems. Some existing designs have obtained permission to export from the U.S. government, and it is expected that similar permission to import, export and/or use such implementations could be obtained from other governments. MILESTONES Feb, 96 Draft of Payment Selection Protocol available as internet-draft Mar, 96 Draft of Payment Protocol Encapsulation specification available as internet-draft Apr, 96 Submit Payment Selection Protocol specification for Proposed Standard May, 96 Consensus on definitions and framework for client- merchant "offer" mechanism, specified in an internet-draft Jun, 96 Submit Payment Protocol Encapsulation specification for transport over Web and email for Proposed Standard Nov, 96 Draft of Offer Specification protocol available as internet-draft Apr, 97 Submit Offer Specification protocol for Proposed Standard