Analyse the Effectiveness of Improvements

Since the end of 1990s the internet and technologies in telecommunication, softwares and hardwares in computer science had been developed to a new level. New dimensions have been brought to our daily life, such as online banking system. It is a completely new method of interaction between users and banks and significantly easier access to users' banking activities when it is compared to traditional excesses. At the same time, motivation and more benefits of online banking are introduced in this essay. However with the widely spread of online banking service, some problems of it (for instance, attacks come from hackers and leakage of personal information) have been discovered and most of these problems have been solved and avoided through new applications in security systems of online banking which will be analysed in the essay.

As technology evolves, more kinds of online banking services are published to personal users and business users with amount of benefits for users and banks. Most banks have established their own online banking systems with using telecommunication and computer science technologies nowadays and provide comprehensive services include: money transfer, online payment (online shopping), checking the account balances and histories. Huge numbers of users are attracted by convenient and fast services provided by banks due to some banking operations which can be done anywhere, anytime on online bank through computers, mobile phones and other similar devices without going to local banks. There are several more advantages of online bank. It is very cost effective owning to less amount of work which means less staff are needed and paperless because that bank statement can be checked online by users themselves. It also provides an easier method to manage users' finances and much lower service charges than for a regular bank (Pulak Chowdhury, 2012).

Security is one of most important factors which contribute to the success of online banking system in customers' experiences through a study based on Keynote Systems (Maria, Apr 25, 2006). Therefore, loyalty of customers to the bank in online bank area depends on protection of users' personal information and avoiding theft of their money. In other field, a good online banking security system would prevent some criminal activities. Nowadays terrorist incidents have been a globalization problem and parts of funding assistances to these terrorist incidents are transferred by using online banking security system's vulnerabilities. To further much more secure online bank, all of banks in the word have developed insecure online banking solutions in the first place (Kjell, Apr 18, 2006). Another point of importance in online banking security system is that the bank would save time and efforts to focus on other parts of its services and business developments as a result of more customers choose online bank.

The security systems of online banks are based on the internet architectures, wap architectures and security requirements. Basic internet architecture includes four parts: a browser, a web server, users and banks. Strong cryptography algorithms are applied into internet architecture as the extra security function due to much more security is required; the standard protocol (http) for communication between browsers and web servers is used as normal internet applications. An improvement of banking software update is made recent years due to Java applications are explored in to banking software area. The banking software could be updated and maintained quickly and automatically on users' devices owing to this improvement. The architectures between internet architecture and wap architecture are similar. One difference between these two architectures is standard communication protocol; wireless application protocol is the foundation of wap architecture which is widely used on mobile phones and other mobile devices. The major feature is that there is no end to end connection between users and online banking server (Joris, 2002). Therefore, banks and users rely on both system own secure gateway (wap gateway) and trusted gateway. The issues of confidentially, entity authentication, data authentication and non-repudiation are necessarily major factors in any online banking system due to security requirements.

There are two main methods on online banking security systems, software-based systems and hardware-based systems. The coding and decoding of information by using encryption algorithms are main cores in software-based security systems. Meanwhile, software-based security system it is more abundant in the market due to its advantages and features. It takes advantage of the intelligence of the costumers and high-speed two-way communications to provide a high level of security (verimatrix, 2008). Hardware-based security systems provide a more secure way to protect users' information and money owing to its closed communication channel between customers and online banking servers but the cost is significantly larger than software-based security systems.

Weakness of software-based security systems is because of attacks from hackers and the effectiveness to security systems is improved by new generations of banking authentication methods. Hackers can