Strengthening Consumer Confidence in E-Commerce Through cybersecurity

Author

Jyotika Uppar

Abstract

 E-commerce depends on digital trust: customers must believe that their credentials, payment data, and order information are protected, and merchants must trust their users and partners. Yet online retail is a prime target for credential theft, payment fraud, phishing, and data tampering, and conventional controls provide only partial assurance. This paper narrows the general digital-trust problem to the e-commerce domain and develops a layered framework that integrates cybersecurity controls with cryptographic mechanisms. It synthesizes the digital trust literature, comparatively evaluates existing security frameworks, builds a domain-specific threat model with an attack tree, and proposes a layered framework spanning identity and access assurance, data protection, and continuous verification. A methodology for implementing and evaluating a working prototype is described, and expected results are discussed in terms of security effectiveness, performance overhead, and customer trust indicators. The work demonstrates how a domain-specific, layered cybersecurity-cryptographic approach can measurably enhance digital trust in online commerce.

Keywords

Digital Trust; E-Commerce; Cybersecurity; Cryptography; Authentication; Encryption; Data Integrity; Zero-Trust.

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