How many people make purchases online? What is the percentage of Americans who conduct their personal financial business over the Internet? Did he or she ever think that their credit card information could possibly be stolen? Internet security for online buyers and eMerchants has become more of a problem with the enormous growth of eCommerce on the Internet in recent years. The security and privacy of data on the Internet may be at greater risk than one would like to think. Many consumers avoid using the Internet to do their banking and purchasing solely because they have concerns about the access that could be gained to their financial information, including credit card numbers, account balances, and Internet usage history. At a recent conference on Internet security and privacy, John McCarthy of Forrester Research estimated that eBusiness "could have been $12 billion greater this past year if consumers' security concerns were fully addressed" (qtd. in Frishberg 2). There is now some protection to help defend against the threat of hackers, but still no guaranteed solution to the Internet security problem.
             While the Internet can never be totally secure, major steps have been made in security technology in the attempt to make this idea a reality. The two issues involved in Internet security are: data encryption and privacy. Encryption is the scrambling of sensitive data to make it difficult for anyone other than the legal users to access it. While data scrambling is sufficient to discourage the casually curious person, it does not stop the serious hacker. This year, hackers were able to break into a 56-bit encryption key in just weeks (Oakes 1). Dr. Tai Rabin, a security specialist in research for IBM, has said, "Encryption algorithms that rely on more than factoring numbers to decode are becoming necessary" (Oakes 2). There is ongoing research in the encryption field, including the study of elli...