Combating e-fraud.Problem. You receive an e-mail from your boss asking you to send the results of all your company's top-secret research to a certain address. How do you know that the e-mail is really from him and not a forgery forgery, in art forgery, in art, the false claim to authenticity for a work of art. The Nature of Forgery Because the provenance of works of art is seldom clear and because their origin is often judged by means of subtle factors, art ? The value of a signature is that it is easily recognizable, but not easily produced by anyone else. Similar technology to that used in encryption The reversible transformation of data from the original (the plaintext) to a difficult-to-interpret format (the ciphertext) as a mechanism for protecting its confidentiality, integrity and sometimes its authenticity. Encryption uses an encryption algorithm and one or more encryption keys. has created `digital signatures'--mathematical procedures which produce an easily verifiable result without the procedure itself being copied. At present, digital signatures are little used, but this could change because of credit-card fraud. According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. PriceWaterhouseCoopers, $16 billion worth of fraudulent The description of a willful act commenced with the Specific Intent to deceive or cheat, in order to cause some financial detriment to another and to engender personal financial gain. transactions were made over the Internet in 1999--roughly half of all credit-card fraud for that year. Alvin Cameron, Credit/Loss Prevention Manager for an Internet credit-card clearing house, estimates that 20-40 per cent of online purchases are fraud attempts. `Doing business on the Internet is the equivalent of having someone walk into your store wearing a ski mask without any ID and offering a bank counter cheque to purchase a $2,000 stereo See stereophonic. system,' he says. |
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