Assurance and e‐auctions: are the existing business models still relevant?

The security of e‐commerce is a serious concern of all the major players in the digital business arena who rely heavily on distributed processing in their routine daily operational chores. The security breaches and the related frauds have cost billions of dollars to the businesses and the industries as a whole and consumers suffer also. It is possible that business models of transaction processing that are viable in conventional commerce might be wrong abinitio in the context of digital business. There is a growing need for robust tools and equally rigorous auditable methodologies in the design and verification of the correctness of the digital processing systems that operate over the Internet. This paper focuses on the economic reasoning of business process design. The author has decided to develop a secure online auction protocol as an attempt to apply the design of mechanism reasoning framework in the direction of information systems audit and control of e‐commerce.