MULTI-THREADING TECHNIQUE FOR AUTHORIZATION OF CREDIT CARD SYSTEM USING .NET AND JAVA

Abstract

This thesis presents a solution to improve the response time of the authorization processing of credit card transaction. During authorization processing of credit card transaction, there is a series of card’s risk management profile to be checked against to determine whether the request should be approved or declined. This series of card’s risk management profile is generally categorized into two major components namely card restriction validation and online fraud validation. In existing legacy system, these two components are authenticated though a single thread during authorization process and thus, the authorization process takes longer time to complete. As a result, the performance of the authorization system is affected whenever there are a lot of transactions to be processed during the peak hours. The goal of this project is to construct two identical real-time multi-threaded authorization systems sharing one architectural design in .NET and Java. This is performed to determine the size and complexity of these similar multi-threaded applications developed using modern programming languages. Through application of multi-threading mechanism in authorization process, each worker thread will assign several child threads to perform online fraud validation concurrently depending on the number of cryptographic elements present in the transaction message while the worker thread itself will perform card restriction validation based on card information stored in shared memory pool. This approach is implemented to reduce the idle time while waiting for slow I/O operations of each cryptographic operation performed through external device and also to accelerate the authorization processing through memory operation instead of accessing similar information from database. A separate thread running in the background of a process space is also used to synchronise the data kept in the shared memory pool. This project is not meant to be a general comparison of .NET and Java platform but specific on evaluation of different implementation approach of multi-threading technique in both platforms. The evaluation about the performance and the effort required to implement these identical multi-threaded applications is also incorporated. To measure the performance of multi-threaded authorization system in both platforms, embedded testing tools have been incorporated in the development of authorization engines to assess the response time of each credit card transaction. The size and complexity of both applications are measured through common software metrics to determine the effort required in each platform.