🚀 go-pugleaf

Tim Randles wrote in message ...

>Today I was at the bank talking about online biz.. and the manger
said she
>would never buy online,... she was concerned about security..
>
>what can we do as developers to dispel that myth?


If you point your newsreader at comp.risks you will find it hard to
think that it is a myth. Securing systems is a very hard proposition,
all we can really do is lower the probability that there are security
holes waiting to be exploited. Maybe we can get to the point that for
small transactions the effort of breaking the encryption is not worth
the gain, but we are not there yet.

Having said that, face to face transactions are not very secure, but
their advantage is that the cost of collecting credit card numbers is
too high for all but the most determined. On a website it is
different. If a website is compromised, potentially all of their
customers credit card numbers are available - suddenly the rewards
are greater than the cost.

As an aside, the standard 40 bit encryption on https is relatively
easy to break by brute force attacks, hence the move to 128 bits.

Pete
----
Pete McBreen, McBreen.Consulting , Cochrane, AB
email: petemcbreen@acm.org    http://www.mcbreen.ab.ca/
Using Creativity and Objects for Process Improvement