The Internet continues to grow globally, and intranets have become increasingly popular as well. This tremendous new market has provokedboth users and service providers to seek greater assurances that information being passed along the Internet is secure. Solutions to financial security problems could open up the Internet to a vast array of money-making services. Credit card giants MasterCard and Visa as well as software mavens Microsoft and Netscape are getting into the act. These are financial security issues, while this column addresses general security.
General security attempts to tackle basic privacy.
For example, e-mail as it now stands hops from SMTP server to server. Sometimes it's copied from one hard disk location to another as a simple text file, which means that anyone can read it. The Internet's approach to e-mail delivery is analogous to hanging your laundry on an outdoor clothesline rather than throwing it in a home dryer. Besides content privacy, users want to know to whom they are talking. They need to be sure that the Internet server on which they're opening a session is the real McCoy, whether it's a World Wide Web, FTP, IRC, or other server.