What Are the Security Problems and Solutions of the Internet?

Internet has vital impact in our life nowadays as it becomes more and more popular. It allows us to have wider range of communication and interaction, to exchange and share experiences, thoughts, information, and to make business online. Without doubt, internet make our life more easier, internet banking system allow us to manage our bank accounts, paying bills without queuing, online shops allow us to make purchase without going out, online education, publication and article postings allow us learn more than what we get from text book, and a lot more.

As Internet plays more important role in our daily life comparing to its initiation, some keen groups are ringing our bell, hackers, and theft of data, crackers. These people are all associated with a term ÐŽ§securityЎЁ. It is not difficult for general publics to point out two of the security issues, security of online transaction and security of message transmission respectively. In fact, system hacking is more fatal.

Most of experienced online people understand that their data transmitted through Internet is in risk of being stolen or peek during transmission. A message or in general called ÐŽ§dataЎЁ transmitting from one end to another, it passes number of nodes. It is far too easy for skilled people to grab those data during its transmission. It is not a serious issue for those who only do general chatting online. For those who doing business (e.g. online shopping) or sending very private materials (e.g. personal information), security becomes a big issue. For this reason, encryption is widely used for protecting the confidentiality of data being transmitted.

INTERNET BUSINESS FOR SECURITY

Basically, online transaction security, email security, network security are major considerations.

Online Transaction Security

There are a lot of online shopping and online casinos operations running worldwide. The most serious problem for these operations is to protect their transaction data, such as clientÐŽ¦s personal information and credit card information. Transaction data transmits from client site to server side. During the transmission, data theft will take this golden opportunity to peek or to duplicate data. If those data had been abused in certain ways, not just the clients suffering from financial lose, but the operator will also suffer from reputation lose. When clients have no confident to shop from the site, the operator will suffer from lost far beyond just reputation. For this reason, kinds data security methods had been developed.

One of the most commonly used one called Secure Socket Layer protocol (SSL)

ÐŽ§The Secure Sockets Layer protocol (SSL) is a protocol layer which may be placed between a reliable connection-oriented network layer protocol (e.g. TCP/IP) and the application protocol layer (e.g. HTTP). SSL provides for secure communication between client and server by allowing mutual authentication, the use of digital signatures for integrity, and encryption for privacy.ЎЁ (1)

Another latest security system is Security Electronic Transactions (SET)

ÐŽ§Security Electronic Transactions (SET) is a system for making payments securely over the Internet. It was developed by credit-card issuers and some major software and computer companies in the US. It uses encryption to make the transactions secure, and digital signatures to identify both merchants and buyers.ЎЁ(2)

Email Security

Business making use of email facilities to deliver their business correspondences is a common practice nowadays because email allow them to send text messages, attachment, photographs, images, and drawings better than traditional fax machines. Emails were sent via number of servers operating by companies, individuals, universities and government. Servers can be equipped with mail scanning to scan certain keywords such as ÐŽ§credit card numberЎЁ.

Encryption before sending is a good way to protect your email. Symmetric key cryptography and Public Key cryptography are examples. The most commonly found encryption is public key cryptography, ÐŽ§an asymmetric scheme that uses a pair of keys for encryption: a public key, which encrypts data, and a corresponding private, or secret key for decryption.ЎЁ(3)

A more secure way now been developed, PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). ÐŽ§PGP combines some of the best features of both conventional and public key cryptography. PGP is a hybrid cryptosystem. PGP then creates a session key, which is a one-time-only secret key. This key is a random number generated from the random movements of your mouse and the keystrokes you type. This session key works with a very secure, fast conventional encryption algorithm to encrypt the plaintext; the result is ciphertext. Once the data is encrypted, the session key is then encrypted to the recipient's public key. This public key-encrypted session key is transmitted along with the ciphertext to the recipient. ÐŽ§(4)

However, no matter how secure the encryption system is, we should understand that it was created by human being, That means there is chance to be cracked down. The speed of current computer cannot do so, but no guarantee for our future computers. It is a matter of time. Hackers and data theft treat security system as challenge instead of obstacles. The security threat is still on.

Network Security

Despite the perfection of available encryption system we have, if our network itself is not secured. All encrypted transmission will be a wasting of time.

Imagine a man stand behind you watching you entering pin number in an ATM machine; the security system cannot actually help you from protecting your pin number. This applies to your network also. All your confidential information is stored in your network. If people break into your network,