SSL
Many
good companies have taken the step of having SSL to ease their prospective
customers’ fears, and so the first thing customers can do is check the
safety of the website by reading the safety transaction information
provided. SSL was first
developed by Netscape to enable data encryption sent by clients to servers
(Larsen 50). The way people
can distinguish whether the site that they access is safe is by looking at
a closed padlock icon for both Netscape and Microsoft.
The advantage of having SSL is that it has the capability to
encrypt any sensitive information prior to sending the data across
the public network. Since SSL
is compatible and comes with most of the popular browsers, e-commerce
companies have taken advantage of it.
Paul
Heino explains that when a company wants to be an e-commerce type of
business, this company needs to apply a certification key from a
certificate authority such as VeriSign
Incorporated.
This key will be recognized by either Netscape or Microsoft
browsers. He also writes that
the certificate authority will check the credibility of the company who
applies for the key to make sure that they have not only legitimate server
address but also a legitimate business (50).
Another way to get an assurance on the safety issue of websites is
to look at the address of the website.
A regular site will start with http://, whereas the secure site
will start with https://, where the extra ‘s’ stands for the word
secure (Goldsborough 22).
According
to Shawn Abbort, during initial transmission a user’s computer browser
has to successfully pass the handshake phase that ensures the clients that
they have just accessed a protected connection.
He continues explaining how SSL works when people are about to give
out their personal data. First, SSL specifies that the server’s
certificate is genuine and truly issued by VerySign Inc.
This verification enables the browser to validate that the website
is well protected. Once the
validation is done, the software then transmits from the customer’s
computer to the website the randomly encrypted data that can be only
decrypted by the targeted server (38).
There
are two different kinds of SSL, and according to Hirbenia Bank
Online, the
standard international browsers usually come with 40-bit encryption as a
default. This means that the data is encrypted using a formula that is
based on a key. 40-bit uses 240 possible keys to protect the customer’s
data, or around approximately 1,000,000,000,000 many possible keys. However, users can upgrade their browser to use a 128-bit
encryption key that can create 309,485,009,821,345,068,724,781,056
possible key combinations.
SSL
has helped data transmission to be safe and dependable because it may take
years for an unauthorized person to crack the code.
While the data is encrypted during transaction to the server, SSL
doesn’t guarantee that the data will stay scrambled in the server.
This is where the hole in SSL comes, and where hackers may gain
access.
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