2003 Volume 16 Issue 12 Pages 616-627
Recently, World Wide Web plays an essential role in public and business applications such as information publication and electronic commerce, and its reliability is strongly required. Mark-based authentication has therefore started. It evaluates web sites and issues authentication marks to the sites. The marks are displayed on web pages of the sites, and users of the sites can judge their reliability by seeing the marks. This paper describes a web site authentication mark system which realizes generation, presentation and verification of marks. Especially the paper describes : (1) requirements for the system concerning security, usability, response speed, cost, and extensibility, (2) mark verification by digital signatures embedded in marks and by online queries, (3) implementation of verification programs as plug-ins of web browsers, (4) version management by embedded version IDs in marks, (5) life cycle management of marks using databases, (6) examples of the system behavior. The paper also explains reality of the proposed system through evaluations and comparison with previous systems.
