Encryption - Popular Encryption Technologies

POPULAR ENCRYPTION TECHNOLOGIES

Countless encryption schemes were used throughout the world for commerce, communication, and other purposes. However, only a small handful achieved particular prominence through the 1990s for use over the Internet in general, and in conjunction with e-commerce in particular. At the top of the list was the RSA encryption system, developed by Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Aldeman in the late 1970s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. RSA went on to become one of the most widely used and best-known encryption systems, programmed into such major software packages as Windows, Quicken, and Netscape Navigator. The CEO of RSA Security, Joe Bidzos, who had long been one of the encryption industry's foremost proponents and a champion of the relaxation of export restrictions, went on to found the RSA spin-off VeriSign in 1995. VeriSign was the leading digital certificate authority through the late 1990s, highlighting the connection to e-commerce. Meanwhile, RSA's encryption software appeared on more than 450 million computers worldwide.

Security Sockets Layer (SSL), a public-key encryption scheme widely used in client-to-server applications, was developed by Netscape and was supported by both Netscape and Microsoft browsers. Identified in commercial software by the small gold lock symbol that appears upon loading a Web page secured by SSL, the scheme was employed for the transmission of personal identification numbers (PINs), credit card information, and passwords, among other things. However, SSL suffered from its complex computation system, which prolongs the time it takes to perform the encryption and decryption processes.

Another popular encryption technology was Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), developed by Phil Zimmerman and released in 1991. PGP was hailed for its easy-to-use format and strong encryption. PGP actually was targeted by government investigators on suspicion of violating export restrictions in the mid-1990s, though the government dropped its case in 1996. Shortly thereafter, PGP Inc. was launched to commercialize the software. After Network Associates purchased PGP, Zimmerman continued to develop the encryption scheme to more widely adapt it to emerging technologies and ripen it for e-commerce applications.

Over the years, a number of file encryption products became available on the market. Most were geared toward individual users seeking to protect information on their hard drives, rather than companies operating over a large network. These programs, such as Symantec Corp.'s Norton Your Eyes Only, encrypted individual files or hard disks and required personal passwords to access them. However, according to Network Computing, these were often seen as excessively cumbersome, particularly for the office setting, since in order to fulfill their function, they required users to remember to encrypt files each time they use them and avoid leaving unprotected copies elsewhere on their hard drives. Moreover, in an office, recovery of data following an employee's departure was crucial, and not always feasible with such programs since they usually lacked data-recovery features. By the 2000s, software programs such as Windows 2000 came equipped with automatic encryption schemes, in which users only needed to set a specific attribute to save encrypted data in a specified, central location on the computer's hard drive. Alternatively, such programs could encrypt data onto a company server and allow only those with authorized access to the files to decrypt them.