How does encryption work?
All the data that is passed back and forth over the Internet during your Home Banking session is encrypted and becomes a string of unrecognizable data before leaving your computer or our site. Our site and your browser hold the keys for solving the mathematical algorithms used to encrypt the data. Each time you establish a Home Banking session, our site and your browser agree on a random key that is used for that session. This makes it possible for the two computers to pass encrypted data back and forth and make it recognizable.
That computer, the secure server, has two secret codes, called keys. One is a public key: a big complicated number sent to you, which is embedded in your messages back to the site, which is itself coded, or “encrypted,” which is just a fancy word for “made secret by turning it into code.” The other is the private key, for you alone, which is what the site uses to match up with the public key, to authenticate that this message comes from you. When the keys match, the system can unlock the code to translate your scrambled information. Techie note: The private key is the prime factors of the public key. Thus, if the public key were 45, the private key would be 5 and 9, the factors that multiplied together make 45. Once all these keys match up, the server translates your order and sends it to the accounting or ordering system. No human gets to read your credit card number during this, and there are no paper receipts lying around for vicious jerks to steal. That s why this process is, ultim
Encryption works by encoding the text of a message with a key. In traditional encryption systems, the same key was used for both encoding and decoding. In the new public key encryption systems, keys come in pairs: one key is used for encoding and another for decoding. In this system everyone owns a unique pair of keys. One of the keys, called the public key, is widely distributed and used for encoding messages. The other key, called the private key, is a closely held secret used to decrypt incoming message. Under this system, a person who needs to send a message to a second person can encrypt the message with that person’s public key. The message can only be decrypted by the owner of the secret private key, making it safe from interception.
