Secure Electronic Commerce in Virtual Enterprises of SMEs A. Luis Os6rio 1 ; Pierre Gibon 2 ; M Martins Barata 1 1 ESTEC, Estudos e Tecnologias da Informar;iio Lda. 2780 Oeiras,TAGUSPARK, ET-I, 21, PORTUGAL Tel:+351 1 4220120, Fax:+351 14214090 e-mail: {lo.mmb}@estec.pt 2LICHEN Informatique 78400 Boulevard de la Republique-bat8, Chatou, France Tel:+33 1 30710702, Fax:+33 1 30710807 e-mail: illicom@calvanet.calvacomfr Abstract 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. Keywords Electronic Commerce, Security, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), Communication Protocols and Services L. M. Camarinha-Matos et al. (eds.), Intelligent Systems for Manufacturing © Springer Science+Business Media New York 1998