At no stage is the transaction decrypted whilst it travels over the Internet, or whilst it is stored on a web site. Hence there is no large store of orders available online to invite attack. The encryption is carried out by using a Java applet. The Java applet is subject to the standard security restrictions of their sandbox which restricts their ability to communicate across the Net to only the web site that they are downloaded from.
Decryption is carried out on the vendor s PC after orders have been downloaded from the web.
The encryption technique used falls into two parts. The Diffie-Hellman key currently used is 256 bits and this will be increased further in the future up to 1024 bits, depending on performance. RSA have based their encryption method on the same fundamental mathematics. The algorithm has been around for some time and has stood the test of time. It is a public algorithm and is freely available.