Securing Electronic Transactions to Support E-Commerce

Many reports regarding online fraud in varieties media create skepticism for conducting transactions online, especially through an open network such as the Internet, which offers no security whatsoever. Therefore, encryption technology is vitally important to support secure e-commerce on the Internet. Two well-known encryption representing symmetric and asymmetric cryptosystems as well as their applications are discussed in this paper. Encryption is a key technology to secure electronic transactions. However, there are several challenges such as crytoanalysis or code breaker as well as US export restrictions on encryption. The future threat is the development of quantum computers, which makes the existing encryption technology cripple.