Java Developer's Journal 1 of 8 Last week a friend of mine who lives in Hong Kong was telling me how advanced the business environment is there. Folks that have Internet access actually use the business facilities the Internet offers. For example, people use the Internet for their regular grocery shopping. They place orders via the Internet, use their credit cards for the transactions and have the goods delivered to their home.
Everyday business is conducted on the Web.
For some reason commerce in the United States hasn't advanced to that level. Security is the primary concern of people and businesses that commit to using the Internet for conducting business transactions. An Internet transaction is conducted between two parties, and each party needs to have a certain level of trust in the other. The parties involved in electronic trade also need to have a high degree of trust in the medium used for the information transfer, namely the Internet. This month we'll take a look at the security issues involved in electronic trade, some of the technologies used for providing security in distributed systems and how Java leverages these technologies.