NEW ASPECTS of APPLIED INFORMATICS, BIOMEDICAL ELECTRONICS & INFORMATICS and COMMUNICATIONS

Transcription

1 The Design of Trust Checker for Assessing e-commerce Website Trustworthiness MUHAMMAD RUSHDI RUSLI 1, AB. RAZAK CHE-HUSSIN 2, HALINA MOHAMED DAHLAN 3 Department of Information Systems Faculty of Computer Science and Information Systems Universiti Teknologi Malaysia Skudai, Johor, Malaysia. 1 mrushdi84@gmail.com, 2 abrazak@utm.my, 3 halina@utm.my Abstract E-Commerce websites must provide trust to attract consumers. There are five most important trust attributes that should be placed in an e-commerce website. However, consumers may not know about the attributes and it takes time for users to search them especially for a beginner computer user. There also five types of extraction rules have been developed and tested which can be used to search these attributes. Tool to search the trust attributes can be developed by applying the extraction rules. This study focuses on how to design Trust Checker, which is a tool that capable to assist the user to assess the trustworthiness of an e- Commerce website. The architecture of the Trust Checker involved three main modules which are CURL, Search and Result module. The flowchart of Trust Checker also has been developed to identify all the process of searching five trust attributes in e-commerce websites. The design process of Trust Checker is illustrated in context diagram and data flow diagram which define what data will be input to the system and what data for the output. Finally, the implementation of Trust Checker shows the input and out specifications which illustrated in user interface of the system. Key-Words Information Extraction, Regular Expression, e-commerce, Trust 1 Introduction Recent statistics from the Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce [1] indicate that total e- Commerce sales for 2008 were estimated around USD billion, which is a 4.6 percent increase over the sales for E-Commerce helps to reduce businesses costs, attains greater market reach, and develops closer partner relationships. It is one of the main factors that e-commerce has grown to be a trend for entrepreneur and inventor to market their products and services on the Internet. When dealing with an untouched and unseen environment, users or consumers tend to question the trustworthiness of this electronic environment [2]. This factor somehow will affect their trust and confidence towards it. According to Che-Hussin et al. [3], there are five top trust attributes that can develop the trustworthiness of e-commerce websites. The trust attributes that have been identified are company s telephone number, address, address, privacy policy and third party for secure transaction. However, most of the customer do not understand and do not even know the existence of these attributes in e-commerce website yet there is still lack of tool to search these trust attributes in order to help the consumer in assessing trustworthiness of an e-commerce website. This paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we describe the five types of patterns of trust attributes that can be used to extract from e- Commerce websites. Section 3 describes the architecture of Trust Checker which involved three main modules and the flowchart of Trust Checker also is explained in this section. Section 4 is explained about design process that involved in development of Trust Checker which includes the context diagram and data flow diagram. Section 5 described the implementation of Trust Checker which explained the specification of input and output of the system. The paper ends with the conclusion and suggestion for future work. 2 Converting Trust Attributes to Regular Expression Patterns According to the Rusli M. R. et al. [4], the authors have proposed four types of extraction rules and some of them have more than one extraction rules since the trust attributes have more than one patterns of information. Besides, this study also creates patterns to extract third party for privacy policy for TRUSTe and BBBOnline by using regular ISSN: X 431 ISBN:

2 expressions. Regular expressions are a way to describe text through pattern matching. Table 1 shows the patterns for the five trust attributes. Based on the attributes in Table 1, company telephone number and company address are the most important attributes that will influence trust of customers towards an e-commerce website. These trust attributes are followed by the privacy policy which states the policy of the vendor regarding their products or services, the company address and third party for secure transaction. The last trust attribute is to guarantee that their personal information is safe and secure. The next section will explained how these patterns can be integrated in Trust Checker that capable to extract trust attributes information from e- Commerce websites. 3 Architecture of Trust Checker Designing system development phase involves system interface and system flow. System interface is a mechanism for user to communicate with the system to produce an output. Designing a good and user friendly system interface is important for user in order to prevent any mistake from users which will lead for system to produce inaccurate output. There are several main functions in the Trust Checker to search five trust attributes. The functions have different role in the system. Figure 1 shows the architecture of the Trust Checker search. Trust Attributes CTN CEA PP CA TPST Country/ Services UK US UK & US Malaysia Apply for all countries TRUSTe BBBOnline UK US VERISIGN CyberTrust McAfee GeoTrust Thawte Entrust GoDaddy TRUSTWAVE Regular Expression Pattern (a): \(?\d{5}\)?[-\s.]\(?\d{6}\)? Pattern (b): +?\d{2}[-\s.]\(?\d{1}\)?[-\s.]?\d{0,3}[-\s.]\d{3,4}[-\s.]\d{3,6} \(?\d{3,4}\)?[-\s.]\d{3}[-\s.]\d{4} \d{1}?[-\s.]?\+?\(?\d{2,3}\)?[-\s.]\d{3,4}[-\s.]\d{3,4}[-\s.]?\d{0,4} Pattern (a): \+?\d{3,4}[-\s.]\d{7} Pattern (b): \+?\(?\d{2,4}\)?[-\s.]\d{4}[-\s.]?\d{3,4} /^[A-z0-9\-_]+(\.[A-z0-9\-_]+)*@(([A-z0-9]+\-?[A-z0-9]+)+\.)+[A-z]{2,6}$/ / / /[A-Z]{1,2}[0-9]{1,2}[\s][0-9]{1}[A-Z]{1,2}/ [A-Z]{2}[\s][<br>]{0,},?[\s]{0,}\d{5}/ a. / b. / a. / b. / c. / a. / b. / c. / +&ref=+".$urlsecure."/i a. /\/\/smarticon.geotrust.com\/si\.js/i b. / a. / b. / / a. / b. / /https?:\/\/sealserver.trustwave.com\/cert.php\?customerid=+[a-za-z0-9=?\/;_&.=]*/i Table 1: Five patterns for trust attributes adapted from M. Rushdi et al. [3] ISSN: X 432 ISBN:

3 Figure 1: The Architecture of Trust Checker 3.1 Main Modules in Trust Checker There are three main modules in Trust Checker which are curl module, search module and result module. These modules will be used in the system to crawl in e-commerce websites in order to search the five trust attributes and lastly display the result CURL Module CURL stands for the Client Uniform Resource Locator and it allows system developer to communicate with other servers using a wide range protocols including FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP, LDAPS and FILE [5]. This module is used to retrieve the source code of an e-commerce website that has been inserted by the user. Source code that has been retrieved is from the homepage and the company s contact page. The source code also will be used to parse into Document Object Model (DOM). The DOM is a complete Application Programming Interface (API) for creating, editing and parsing XML documents [6]. This process is used to identify link s title for privacy and contact which contain the information about the company privacy policy and company contact information Search Module Extraction rules that have proposed by Rusli M. R. et al. [4] will be applied in the Trust Checker which can be used to search the five trust attributes in e- Commerce websites. After the Trust Checker retrieves the source code of webpage from the URL that has been inserted by the user, it will search for the five trust attributes in the source code. The system will search strings that are match with the proposed extraction rules. Trust attributes for company telephone number, company address, company address and third party secure transaction are searched by using the extraction rules. Besides that, the Trust Checker also will identify the entire links names that contain word of privacy. Besides that, this paper also has included patterns that can be used to search third party for privacy policy. The information of the existence of the third party somehow will help to gain customer s trust towards an e-commerce website [7] besides the five trust attributes. Besides that, the Trust Checker will also search the link name that contains word of contact. The observation that has been conducted by the Rusli M. R. et. al. also shows that most of e-commerce websites also put the contact information in contact us section. If the system found that the webpage contains contact link names in the source code, it will keep the link for the next process. After process of searching is finished for the homepage, the system will proceed to search the trust attributes in the company s contact page. Same process of searching like before will be repeated for the page. The system will only search trust attributes on these two webpage which are homepage and company s contact page Result Module In this module, the Trust Checker will produce output of trust attributes which successfully searched by the system. The result will display a list for the five trust attributes that show the e- Commerce company information and the status of the existed five trust attributes, whether they are exist or not. The system will also show link of the e- Commerce website that has been inserted by the user for them if they have decided to proceed to visit the website. Besides that, the system will calculate the percentage of trustworthiness level of the website based on the most important to the less important. However, the existed of third party for privacy policy is included in the calculation of the percentage since the information is provided just to acknowledged the customer and increase their trust toward e-commerce websites between the website ISSN: X 433 ISBN:

4 that has the privacy policy link which also has the third party and the website that has the privacy link but do not have any third party for privacy policy. 3.2 Trust Checker Flowchart There are several processes involved in the Trust Checker and Figure 2 shows its flow chart. the end exit the system. The process of searching the five trust attributes will continue to the company contact page if the system successfully found the page. Then, the system will display the result of the trust attributes such as company telephone number, company address, the existence status of privacy policy and the third party of privacy policy, company address and type of third party secure transaction used by the e-commerce website. 4 Design Process of Trust Checker 4.1 Context Diagram A context diagram is a simple diagram that represents the system as a single "black box" surrounded by its major interfaces, thus showing the system in its environment [8]. The Context diagram defines what data will be input to the system and what data will be output. Figure 3 shows the context diagram for Trust Checker and involved with two users, which are user and admin. Figure 2: The flowchart of Trust Checker According to the figure 2, user has to insert Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of an e-commerce website that the user intended to assess the trustworthiness level of the website as the first step. When the input is inserted by the user, the system will retrieve the source code of the website. If the process failed, the system will automatically exit and show a message mentioning that the website has a retrieve failure. The situations usually occur when the user inserts a website which does not exist. When the system successfully retrieves the source code, it will start to search the five trust attributes in the source code. The system will keep the value of trust attributes found in the page with the assumption that the entered website by the user is the homepage of the e-commerce website. Besides that, the system also will identify every link s title found in the page. The purpose of the process is to find the company contact s page. If the system does not found the company contact s page, it will proceed to view the trust attributes found in the homepage and in Figure 3: Context Diagram for Trust Checker According to the figure 3, the user only needs to insert input of an URL of e-commerce website that they need to assess its trustworthiness and finally the Trust Checker will give the result to the user about the existence of trust attributes in the website. However, administrator is capable to manipulate the information of Malaysia s address. 4.2 Data Flow Diagram Level 0 Figure 4 shows DFD in level 0, which is the detail process expansion derived from the context diagram. ISSN: X 434 ISBN:

5 According to the figure 4, there are five modules that involved in system of Trust Checker and three of them are the main modules which have been explained in the previous section. Figure 4: DFD Level-0 for Trust Checker 5.0 The Implementation of Trust Checker 5.1 Input Specification Input specification is the type of data or information that is required by a system from user to produce an output. The input must be accurate to make sure system can process them without any problem. A good system should have a mechanism to validate the input that has been inserted by the user. In this study, the system that will be developed needs only an input which is URL of an e- Commerce website. To reduce mistakes for users from entering the wrong input, the user only has to select type of URL which starts with http// or https//. Figure 5 shows the input form in the Trust Checker. Checker as an input and the user is required to click Get Info to proceed the process of searching. 5.2 Output Specification Output specification is information that produced by Trust Checker after a certain input has been inserted and processed by the Trust Checker. The process of producing output is important because the purpose of every system that has been developed is to produce a useful output for the user. The outputs are fully depending on the input that has been inserted. In this study, there are only six outputs that will be produced by the Trust Checker. The example of the outputs is shown in Figure 6. Figure 5: Input form in Trust Checker According to the figure 5, URL of is inserted in Trust Figure 6: Output in Trust Checker ISSN: X 435 ISBN:

6 The outputs are the information of trust attributes that exist in an e-commerce website which are company telephone number, company address, privacy policy, third party of privacy policy, company address and third party for secure transaction. Besides that, the system will also calculate the percentage of trustworthiness of the e- Commerce website based on the existence of trust attributes according to the most important to the less important. The percent is represented in scale of colours which is red for poor; orange for average and green is for excellent. 5.0 Conclusion and Future Works It can be concluded that, trust is an important factor in order to establish e-commerce transactions. Previous researchers have identified the trust attributes that should be placed in an e-commerce website which are company telephone number, company address, privacy policy, company address and third party for secure transaction. These trust attributes are the most important things to gain customer confidence towards e-commerce websites. Previous researchers also have proposed extraction rules by using regular expressions that can be used to search these trust attributes which focus on UK, US and Malaysia e-commerce websites. This study has focused on how to design Trust Checker by applying the extraction rules in order to assist consumer to assess the trustworthiness of an e- Commerce website. There are three main modules that are used to design the Trust Checker which are CURL, search and result module. The flowchart of Trust Checker shows the process of searching these five trust attributes from the input that has been inserted by the user until the process of displaying result which is information that can help the user to assess the trustworthiness of the website. The future work that will be carried out shall include testing the effectiveness and the accuracy of the technique that are using regular expression and finally testing the practicability of the Trust Checker. International Symposium on Information Technology 2008, : p Che-Hussin A. R., Macaulay L., and Keeling K., The Importance Ranking of Trust Attributes in e- Commerce Website. 11th Pacific-Asia Conference on Information Systems, Rusli M. R., Che-Hussin A. R., and Dahlan H. M., Assessing Trust in E-Commerce Website based on Ranking of Trust Attributes. WSEAS Transactions on Business and Economics, (1): p Corno F., The PHP Client URL (curl) library. 2009, Department of Computer Science and Automation. 6. Converse T., Park J., and Morgan C., PHP5 and MySQL Bible. 2004: Wiley Publishing, Inc. 7. Boritz E., No W. G., and Sundarraj R. P. Internet Privacy in E-Commerce: Framework, Review, and Opportunities for Future Research. in Proceedings of the 41st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2008) Gottesdiener E., Use Cases: Best Practices References: 1. The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce. Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales [cited; Available from: tml. 2. Othman N. Z., Che-Hussin A. R., and Rakhmadi A., Trust Mechanisms: An Integrated Approach for E- Commerce Website Development Process. ISSN: X 436 ISBN: