A clear and easy guide on how to use cryptography to secure e-commerce transactions

To be on the cutting edge of e-commerce, you need to understand how to best utilize cryptography to offer secure services for your customers over the Internet. But if you reach for most of the available books on the subject, you'll find that they are far too technical for most business needs. If you need a quick and lucid managerial summary to help you develop effective e-commerce strategies, this is the book for you.

Geared to nontechnical managers who would like to explore the underlying concepts of modern cryptography, this book features an easily accessible, logical explanation of how cryptography works to solve real-world e-commerce problems, a tutorial on the underlying mathematics, and two case studies of PKI cryptographic architectures, showing how Kerberos and PKC can be wedded to protect a company's intranet and how a full-blown working PKI provides security to a company's Internet communications.

Divided into three major parts tailored to readers' needs-Introduction to Modern Cryptography, Tutorial on the Mathematics of Cryptography, and case studies-the book covers:

How symmetrical key cryptography ensures confidentiality of messages

How cryptography lets you detect whether a message has been modified in transit

Why the distribution of cryptographic keys is important and difficult

The nuts and bolts of Kerberos-a major component of Microsoft's Windows 2000 security solution

How Public Key Cryptography ensures security between people who share no prior secret information

Digital signatures on electronic contracts and the concept of non-repudiation

How digital certificates ensure positive identification of individuals

For non-technical managers who would like to explore the underlying concepts of cryptology, cryptographic architect Graff explains how it works to solve real-world problems in electronic commerce. He also provides a tutorial on the underlying mathematics and two studies of architectures.
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