The Security of Electronic Banking

The Internet has played a key role in changing how we interact with other people and how we do business today. As a result of the Internet, electronic commerce has emerged, allowing businesses to more effectively interact with their customers and other corporations inside and outside their industries. One industry that is using this new communication channel to reach its customers is the banking industry. The electronic banking system addresses several emerging trends: customers’ demand for anytime, anywhere service, product time-to-market imperatives and increasingly complex back-office integration challenges. The challenges that oppose electronic banking are the concerns of security and privacy of information. The current focus of security of information transfer is on the session layer protocols and the flaws in end-to-end computing. A secure end-to-end transaction requires a secure protocol to communicate over untrusted channels and a trusted code at both endpoints. The solution addresses the use of secure protocols because trusted channels don’t really exist in most of the environment, especially since we are dealing with linking to the average consumers. The solutions to the security issues require the use of software-based systems or hardware-based systems or a hybrid of the two. These software-based solutions involve the use of encryption algorithms, private and public keys, and digital signatures to form software packets known as Secure Electronic Transaction used by Mastercard and Pretty Good Privacy. Hardware-based solutions such as the Smartcard and the MeChip provide better protection for the confidentiality of personal information. Software-based solutions have the advantage over hardware-based solutions in that they are easy to distribute and are generally less expensive.