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"It may roundly be asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct
a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve."
- Edgar Allan Poe
IT IS CLEAR
THAT WITH THE RAPID GROWTH and global accessibility of
the Internet, it will be utilized as a major vehicle for commerce. Advertising possibilities
aside, though, the problem has been how to actually exchange money online. The security
issues are endless and making your customer comfortable with separating themselves
from their money is at the base of every consumer transaction.
In the beginning, in order to avoid fraud, a manual signature was necessary to be
considered a legal transaction. This changed with the advent of virtual signatures,
a way to ensure that the person that you are talking to is the person that should
authorize the transaction. Many banks still use this virtual signature for authentication
when dealing with their customers over the phone. The problem here is that as soon
as you find a piece of information that both parties can know, your mothers' maiden
name for example, that information can be tracked down. Thus the creation of personal
identification numbers. These numbers are unknown even to the institution. They are
used only by the company's computer to recognize the user.
With the addition of personal identification numbers, customers were allowed to do
financial transactions at the place of business but this meant having cash somewhere
that both parties had access to. This created the monsters 'E-dollars" and "e-banks."
The purchasing party would transfer funds into an E-bank account and then have the
ability to spend that money online. There was little to no security in the exchange
of information during this transaction and hackers inevitably could spend your money
and receive the goods and services.
It became obvious that for even a simple transaction, a secure place to make the
information exchange was necessary. Thus, the creation of cryptographic protocol
and standards took place. Cryptography deals with securing messages, authentication,
digital signatures, electronic money and other applications. Ultimately, the encrypted
message is an encoded message with the content hidden from outsiders.
Today to go shopping online you can fairly safely use your credit or bankcard due
to the creations of two such standards.
1) Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a protocol developed by Netscape for transmitting
private documents via the Internet. SSL works by using a private key to encrypt data
that's transferred over the SSL connection. Both Netscape Navigator and Internet
Explorer support, and many Web sites use the protocol to obtain confidential use
information, such as credit card numbers. By convention, Web pages that require an
SSL connection start with https: instead of http.
2) Another protocol for transmitting data securely over the World Wide Web is Secure
HTTP (S-HTTP). Whereas SSL creates a secure connection between a client and a server,
over which any amount of data can be sent securely, S-HTTP is designed to transmit
individual messages securely. SSL and S-HTTP, therefore, can be seen as complementary
rather than competing technologies. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has
approved both protocols as a standard. (Webopedia definitions)
A consumer can now pay bills through direct debit and buy a car through direct credit.
All banking can be handled on-line. The new e-dollars, which deal with serial numbers,
can be traced and is run through a secure site giving the consumer even more spending
options. The creation of auctions, virtual malls and catalogue sites for almost every
business out there, means that the consumer has to do little more than 'log on' to
safely, for the time being, receive goods and services from the Internet. These options
will probably make cash and money related documents obsolete in the not-so distant
future.
There are over 165 million Internet users and the estimated revenue of the Internet
in 1998 was 74 billion dollars. Speed, savings in advertising, international distribution
and better customer service will ensure that this money will continue to be exchanged.
The problem persists. Inevitably, as new solutions to this exchange of money creep
up, so will new methods of cracking these solutions.
There have always been people who will work very hard to avoid work and there probably
always will be.
Leah Spafford was
born and raised in Saskatchewan. Leah moved to Calgary in 1990 and is currently taking
a two-year Multi-Media course at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. Leah
plans on owning a small web design company and hopes to run it out of a farm west
of Calgary.
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