E-commerce - Cape Peninsula University of Technology

Chapter 2: Literature review Page 39
client. However, technological impediments exist in the security
technologies that prevent hackers from attacking the client and server
sites themselves (McCrohan, 2003).
Transaction security concerns typically involve issues of either
privacy or guarantees of knowing to whom one is sending or from
whom one is receiving data. Much of the anxiety over Internet
security is unfounded and not a result of actual technological flaws.
Primarily, weaknesses in Internet security are the failure to utilize
existing security features of the Internet such as authentication and
encryption (De Borchgrave, Cilluffo, Cardash & Ledgerwood, 2000).
Just as a phone line can be tapped, an Internet message can be
overheard by various sources. Fear of privacy breaches over the
Internet is a product of its design. One core problem is that the Internet
is a very public and accessible communications network. Data
transmitted can be intercepted fairly easily. If not scrambled or made
uninterpretable during transmission, messages can likewise be easily
read at any forwarding node on the Internet (Gordon, Loeb, Lucyshyn
& Richardson, 2005).
Internet technology is no better or worse than telephone technology in
guaranteeing that the person on the other end of the line is who they
claim to be. Short of having a guarantor analogous to a thumb print or
a signature, one cannot be sure with whom one is dealing. To secure
Internet computing, technology was created to conceal messages and
guarantee the identity of people on each end of the transmission.
Digital signatures, Secure Electronic Transaction (SET), and similar
technologies can act as guarantors for the transaction, assuring
interested parties that the signatories involved currently exist and are
who they claim to be (Gordon, Loeb, Lucyshyn & Richardson, 2005).