Is It Really Safe to Order Online?
Web Commerce Today, Issue 3, October 15, 1997
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Note that this statement has two sections, the first for customer-to-website communications, the second for website-to-merchant communications. If you use a secure Web browser rather than PGP for website to merchant communications, do not include the second section.
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We offer the highest level of commercial Internet security available.
Security when you place your orderIf you have a Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer Web browser, you have a high quality built-in encryption system when used with our SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Web server.This encryption system is so good that the U.S. Government has limited its export to certain countries. Netscape, for example, says: "Because of export restrictions, Netscape Navigator is limited to a 40-bit key size for the RC4 stream encryption algorithm (the encryption algorithm used by Netscape Navigator's implementation of SSL). A message encrypted with 40-bit RC4 will take on average 64 MIPS-years to break (a 64-MIPS computer will need a year of dedicated processor time to break the message's encryption). This is not military-grade security, but the effort required to break any given 'https' data exchange is definitely nontrivial." This encryption system is based on the invention of the RSA Public Key Cryptosystem in 1977 by Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman, a trio professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When you are in "secure" mode, any forms you fill out with personal or credit card information are securely encrypted from your desktop to the "Web server computer" which hosts the merchant's order form Web page on the Internet. |
PGPTM developed by Philip Zimmermann, employs some of the strongest unclassified encryption technology available to provide complete privacy for your transaction.
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Security when your order is transmitted to the merchantBut that's not all. From the "Web server computer" the messsage is transmitted to the merchant's desktop computer to be processed. That transmission is also encrypted using the RSA Public Key Cryptosystem incorporated into PGP.It is encoded when it is sent, and can only be decoded by the merchant who owns the store. Though there is only a very slight risk that these messages might be intercepted in transit by some cyber hacker, even if he got the message he couldn't do anything with it. The cryptography is so good that it would take many days of hard work to break the code, even by the best cryptographers. Your credit data is really safe with us. Please feel confident. We have spared no expense to incorporate the very finest commercial security systems available. |
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