Online transaction system having an authenticated payment component

摘要

A system for authenticating a payment transaction over a network comprises: a profile database; a transaction archive and an authentication service web server coupled to the profile database, the transaction archive and the network. The authentication service web server is adaptively configured to store a public key associated with a public key infrastructure (PKI) key pair in a profile database. In response to receiving an authentication request from a buyer over a network, the authentication request includes a description of the payment transaction and an identity of a seller, sends a challenge request to the buyer over the network and then digitally signed by the buyer using a private key associated with the PKI key pair. The challenge request includes a summary of the payment transaction to be displayed to the buyer. In response to receiving a challenge response from the buyer over the network, the challenge response includes the digitally signed summary of the payment transaction, determines whether the buyer has access to the private key by using the public key to decrypt the digitally signed summary of the payment transaction and if so determined, stores a digitally signed record of the payment transaction in a transaction archive and sends an authentication response to the seller over the network.