How To Make Secure Electronic Transactions?
Secure Electronic Transactions is a protocol developed by VISA and Master card with help of several IT companies like Microsoft, IBM, Netscape, VeriSign and RSA. Development of secure electronic transactions protocol started in 1996. Secure Electronic Transactions protocol relies a lot on cryptography, because of the fact that it has been designed to make secure credit card and other financial transactions over insecure, non-encrypted Internet connections. Secure electronic transactions are primarily based on the X.509 standard for defining public key encryption certificates. Secure electronic transactions protocol however adds a number of extensions to the X.509 base, in order to make it more streamlined for use as a secure financial transaction platform.
Secure electronic transactions are open standard and are used to ensure the credibility of a financial transaction. Secure electronic transactions protocol makes use of two different encryption systems and one authentication system. The encryption system used by secure electronic transactions is the symmetric DES encryption (Data Encryption Standard) and the asymmetric public key encryption, which is used to transmit session keys for DES encrypted transactions. This type of cryptographic process of Secure Electronic Transactions has been criticized by the cryptanalyst community because while secure electronic transactions encrypts the session key with a stronger encryption algorithm, it encrypts actual session data containing transaction details with a weaker encryption algorithm. The other encryption standard used by secure electronic transactions is the RSA standard. The authentication part of the secure electronic transactions relies on digital signatures. Secure electronic transactions protocol uses a hashing system to sign the private key at the beginning of the transaction. Use of digital signature, aims to be at par with manual signature in the real world and therefore secure electronic transactions makes sure that transaction comes from an authentic authority. Secure Electronic Transactions is a better protocol as compared to the now popular Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption because unlike SSL and TLS which only secure a transaction line from eavesdroppers or man-in-the middle attacks, the Secure Electronic Transactions also attempts to protect customer from a fraudulent seller as well as protecting seller from a fraudulent customer. This is done by using the authentication part mentioned above. Secure Electronic Transactions makes sure that even if the credit card details get leaked, one will not fall victim to fraudulent transactions because the digital signature will be virtually impossible to leak as it is generated by software installed on the computer. Unlike Secure Electronic Transactions protocol, both SSL and TLS only encrypt credit card information, which the seller has to process, so if someone obtains credit card details, he can exploit the information to make false purchases. |