How secure is SSL encryption?
Consider this: In 1995, it took a French graduate student a little over a week to crack a message sent with the traditional 40-bit encryption, and he used a network of 112 computers to do it! Today, the US Defense Department might be able to do it in a matter of minutes, but at 128-bits, it would take the world’s most sophisticated hardware and software something more than the age of the universe to decipher the encryption! The 128-bit technology is practically unbreakable. It is simply naive to be afraid of the Net. What do professionals say? Peter H. Lewis, The New York Times: — Sending a credit card number to an electronic merchant over the internet is probably the safest way to make such a transaction. In the last week, for example, I handed my credit card to a waiter who disappeared with it for five minutes. I faxed my credit card details to a business in New Jersey, and the fax probably lay exposed to everyone in that office for hours and perhaps to the cleaning crew that night.
