Setback for SET

Researcher Gartner Group has damned the SET security standard for ecommerce, warning retailers and banks to steer clear of the system unless they have ?compelling reasons? to do otherwise.

Gartner Group criticised the complexity and performance of the system developed by Mastercard and Visa to protect online credit card transactions.

Victor Wheatman, research director at Gartner Group, said transactions protected by SET take between 30 and 50 seconds to process.

?With performance like that, your Web servers will not be able to do anything else but process SET transactions,? he said.

The earliest the system can be improved is the end of next year, when a second version of SET is scheduled for release.

?Our bottom line is we?ll wait and we?re telling our merchant customers and the banks to wait for the next version ? unless they have a compelling reason to proceed,? Wheatman said.

Until then, Wheatman recommends using alternative standards such as SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), created by Netscape and encryption specialist RSA.

A representative for Visa said there has been ?good? demand for SET version 1.0. Although no UK banks have trialled SET, 17 banks across mainland Europe are piloting the system, he claimed.

?We?re happy with how SET 1.0 is performing, but we realise it needs to be developed and made faster,? he added.

? Report by Tim Stammers.