Editing Secure Electronic Transaction (section)

== History and development ==
[[File:SET Design Team 1996.jpg|thumb|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.]]
SET was developed by the '''SET Consortium''', established in 1996 by [[Visa Inc.|Visa]] and [[Mastercard]] in cooperation with [[GTE]], [[IBM]], [[Microsoft]], [[Netscape Communications Corporation|Netscape]], [[Science Applications International Corporation|SAIC]], Terisa Systems, [[RSA Security|RSA]], and [[VeriSign]].<ref>Merkow p.248</ref> 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.<ref name="CNET/2100-1017-225723">{{cite news |last1=Clark |first1=Tim |title=Visa, Mastercard try to revive SET - Tech News |url=http://news.com.com/2100-1017-225723.html |access-date=14 June 2023 |work=CNET.com |date=May 12, 1999 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20020421014244/http://news.com.com/2100-1017-225723.html |archive-date=21 April 2002}}</ref>

SET allowed parties to identify themselves to each other and exchange information securely. Binding of identities was based on [[X.509]] certificates with several extensions.<ref>SET Specification Book 2 p.214</ref> SET used a [[blinding (cryptography)|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.

Unfortunately, the implementation by each of the primary stakeholders was either expensive or cumbersome.  There were also some external factors that may have complicated how the consumer element would be integrated into the browser.  There was a rumor circa 1994-1995 that suggested that Microsoft sought an income stream of 0.25% from every transaction secured by Microsoft's integrated SET compliant components they would implement in their web browser.