Secure Electronic Transaction

[1] The consortium’s goal was to combine the card associations' similar but incompatible protocols (STT from Visa/Microsoft and SEPP from Mastercard/IBM) into a single standard.

[3] SET used a cryptographic blinding algorithm that, in effect, would have let merchants substitute a certificate for a user's credit card number.

If SET were used, the merchant itself would never have had to know the credit-card numbers being sent from the buyer, which would have provided verified good payment but protected customers and credit companies from fraud.

SET was intended to become the de facto standard payment method on the Internet between the merchants, the buyers, and the credit-card companies.

Once registration is done, cardholder and merchant can start to do transactions, which involve nine basic steps in this protocol, which is simplified.

Privacy is preserved as the MD can't be reversed, which would reveal the contents of the OI or PI.

The SET Design Team at Visa International offices in Foster City, California, July, 1996 in a picture to commemorate the publication of the work, which was followed by a lunch on San Francisco Bay.