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The Electronic Commerce is being considered as the key to the success of the SME. In fact, the flexibility brought by last innovations in Information Technologies (lT) speedup the creation of a new generation of low cost IT based tools. However the need for a common understanding among the panoply of emergent and particular contributions associated to the need of a global and interoperable infrastructure have brought many application difficulties. Beyond those integration problems a secure and flexible communication framework is also a key to achieve such global infrastructure to support Electronic Commerce. Entrepreneurs condition the application of such innovations in front of clear guarantees of privacy, integrity and authenticity in addition to high quality trusted services. This paper presents some contributes to such secure infrastructure that are being proposed and developed inside the European ESPRIT project PRODNET.

visibility, reduction of the time necessary to do business, and others, are being understood by all business interlocutors. The synergy generated by the Internet services is forcing everyone to look at this new technology and to integrate it to support their business processes. One example of this tendency is the increasing level of e-mail addresses that are being used as a fast way to exchange information, not only private but also as a business support. Nevertheless, this boom brought a set of new problems to the communication infrastructure. The openness of the communication protocols forces the utilization of techniques to guarantee the privacy of communication channels and the establishment of authentication mechanisms to provide interlocutors credibility (Os6rio, 1997).The main goal of this chapter is to present and discuss the communication infrastructure requirements for the virtual enterprise operation. Besides communication, privacy is also an important topic considering the necessary availability of a private network equivalent connecting virtual enterprise nodes and guaranteeing messages privacy and integrity and authentication of all enterprise members. The credibility of any communication infrastructure deeply relies on two technological aspects: the availability of the communication channels and its degree of privacy. The complexity of the Internet communication services (Jamsa, 1995), (Dowd, 1996) and the panoply of involved protocols, in addition to its open characteristic, create some expectations and concerns in enterprises managers. This chapter intends to clarify some important aspects of the Internet protocol suit arguing in favor of its adoption as PRODNET low level communication stack. COMMUNICATION REQUIREMENTSCommunication among different computational processes or applications, produced by different application developers, adds complexities at different levels. Beyond a mandatory common information language/format, the physical distribution involves also security issues.In an ascending classification complexity communication can be first considered among applications running in the same computer, second between applications running in different computers located in the same local networks (Intranets) and, fmally, the communication among applications running in computers located in different Intranets. The last scenario is, in fact, the most complex for two main reasons: on one hand, whatever the communication mechanism is, it can fail; on the other hand, there are several security-related problems that contribute to the complexity ofa distributed system (Tanenbaum, 1994), (Coulouris, 1994). There are also some relevant aspects from the application side that constrain the characteristics that may be available in a communication infrastructure. From those characteristics the most relevant are:• communication availability and quality; • communication resources availability and communication costs; • information security/privacy and integrity; • authentication; • date and time co-ordinatio...

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is getting a crescent adherence to represent information/data exchanged between systems, not only in the Internet domain but also to support interoperability among heterogeneous enterprise applications. The ED/ community is playing a major role, contributing to establish an effective electronic commerce among SMEs with the adoption of XML and related standards in conjunction with the normalized semantics that de facto supports the ED/, as it is done nowadays. This paper discusses the advantages that the XML technology brings to the electronic commerce and the strategy used to extend the PRODNET infrastructure. The business processes in Virtual Enterprises are deeply dependent of communications among trading partners with heterogeneous technologies. The complexity of the exchanged messages requires a flexible, easy to understand, easy to manage and widely accepted representation language to model business information.