Trusted connections

As businesses and consumers alike use increasing amounts of digital content, the question of security is never far behind. With eCommerce about to move to the mobile platform and create a commercial channel that could dwarf the Internet, the availability of secure and trusted connections over these networks will become imperative.

We concluded by asking Dr Elgamal about the big security issues today, and what he thinks should be done to solve them.

“The mixed use of a web browser, for searching and browsing content as well as conducting transactions, is somewhat responsible for the state of web security today. We want consumers to be able to have as much flexibility as possible in looking at content, but the level of assurance we need, from authenticating all parties of a transaction to each other, to preventing unauthorized access to confidential content, is hard to enforce in such an open environment.

“I believe that the Internet infrastructure itself can, and will, be made more aware of identities of parties to transactions, and that the authentication technologies that have been in development over the past few years will make transactions more reliable.

“This is likely to be a slow progress, though, since we are now faced with the unenviable task of ‘retrofitting’ the current Internet infrastructure for conducting more trustworthy transactions,” he concludes.

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