Safety of Online Shopping Through Mathematics

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Safety of Online Shopping Through Mathematics

The easy and convenient way of shopping from the Internet attracts customers from all over the world to shop on-line. Anyone can browse the millions of websites, like Amazon.com and Ebay.com, that sell a variety of items or hold on-line auctions, as long as they have Internet access. Most big chain stores in the United States have on-line stores that sell the items they have in the stores for the convenience of lazy shoppers. However, there are risks that shopper should consider before they decide to buy from a site. Aside from the quality of the item, they have to worry about the safety of the money transition on the web. Most sites accept credit cards as a method of payment. However, how can we be sure that giving out our credit card numbers over the Internet is safe? What if someone intercepts the transaction and steals our numbers? Can we trust the Internet?

People have been working with coding words and numbers to send secret messages or to keep information private for a very long time. For example, about two thousand years ago, Julius Caesar encrypted the alphabet, called the Caesar Cipher, to send messages. So that even if his enemies intercepted the messages, they wouldn’t be able to read them. However, his simple encryption wasn’t effective because it was easy to decipher; therefore mathematicians and other scholars work hard to find other complicated encryptions. Early methods of cryptography, the study of encryption, used symmetrical key cipher, a technique which two people who want to send messages to each other privately have to exchange a key beforehand; however it created great difficulties and inconvenience to the users. To solve the problem of exchanging keys, th...

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...g RSA Encryption In Openssl. Lubow, Eric. 25 Sep, 2003. Linux Security.com. 25 July, 2005.

Flannery, Sarah with Flannery, David. In Code: A mathematical Journey. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2001.

The Mathematical Guts of RSA Encryption. Litterio, Francis. The WWW Virtual Library. 25 July, 2005.

Public Key Cryptography (PKC) History. The Living Internet site. 27 July, 2005.

“Public Key Cryptography”: How is Your Credit Card Number Encrypted Online?. 30 Nov, 2000. Bowdoin College. 27 July, 2005.

Singh, Simon. The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography. New York: Anchor, 2000.

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