The proliferation of cracking has made it necessary for both corporate America and the governmentto devise new ways to combat data interception. Some of those are listed below. One prominent individual has also been outspoken in his quest for safety nets in cyberspace.
Netscape Communications Corporation announced the release of an upgrade of their popular World Wide Web browser in March of 1995. Navigator 1.1, they said in a press release, would have "additional security options" such as the use of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol when using Usenet newsgroups. This, Netscape claimed, would allow for safe financial transactions over the Internet.
In September, however, two UC-Berkeley students broke into Netscape's security code using what Fortune magazine called "some clever reverse engineering". Netscape soon thereafter released a press statement titled "Potential Vulnerability in Netscape Products" in which it admitted the possibility exists for third-party interception of financial transactions.
Their response was to "significantly increase the amount of random information that cannot be discovered by external sources from approximately 30 bits to approximately 300 bits". They also plan to "greatly expand" the sources and techniques used to generate random information.
Spyglass, Inc. -- a company which is expected to announce an Initial Price Offering on the NASDAQ stock exchange soon and, like Netscape, take off -- has proposed the use of an "open, extensible" protocol based on extensions of the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) used to communicate on the World Wide Web. It would use "multiple sets of extensions reflecting the diverse security needs of the Internet community".
NetShade would "automatically and invisibly encrypt all of the Internet data sent from one NetShade user to another". It would use 'public key' encryption (similiar to PGP) as well as 'secret key' encryption, where one single secret key is used to lock and unlock data. < a href=" http://www.atemi.com"> Atemi , which produces NetShade, claims their product differs from others because it could be used to secure any sort of data sent over the Internet, not just e-mail or shared files.
The Clipper Chip is a device that the National Security Agency (NSA) developed. The Clinton Administration originally wanted the Clipper will be installed in every computer, phone, and fax machine to provide a '"back door" encryption algorithm that could, with proper authorization, be accessed by the government. This pitted law-enforcement agencies such as the FBI , the CIA and the NSA against civil libertarians who feared the encroachment of Big Brother even further into the daily lives of citizens.
In a Business Week article from February, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) member Susan Varney outlined her plans to make cyberspace safer for electronic commerce. She plans to target fraud, misleading advertisements, and privacy, and wants to go about doing so with help from the business community. In fact, she hopes to work with industry to help devise rules for commerce on the Internet, and in order to stave off increased government intervention the industry has began to collaborate on privacy standards through the Interactive Services Association .
PGPis a public-key encryption program, which means it works by "generating two encryption keys for each user, a private key that no one but the user can access (via a password), and a public key that the user distributes to anyone he/she wants to." Phil Zimmerman , the writer of the PGP program, believes that PGP electronic signatures are as legally binding as paper signatures, although no law backs this up yet -- a bill is being considered in Congress.
For further reference on responses to cracking, you may want to check out the electronic version of The Hacker Crackdown <http://www.usfca.edu/crackdown/crack.html>, by Bruce Sterling.