An ACID Framework for Electronic Commerce

In this paper we deene several properties necessary for electronic commerce. Principal among these are the ACID contractual properties of agreement, causality, isolation, and durability. Although similar to the ACID database transactional properties, our ACID properties are derived more directly from the elements of contract law. Also included are the security properties of privacy , authentication, integrity, and non-repudiation, and the structural properties of scalability and separation of roles. The former are derived from existing practice in distributed systems, while the latter are derived from common forms of commerce. We then describe Forum, a framework for electronic commerce that supports these properties, and demonstrate that this framework can provide more general forms of commerce than existing frameworks .