Is Buying Online Safe?

From ValleyPurchases.com, http://valleypurchases.com

Some say that buying online is actually safer than using your credit card at a physical location. Why or How? Well No person actually gets to see your credit card or view your credit card numbers when the transaction is processed via the internet. However when buying in person many store clerks will need to actually handle your credit card to swipe it through at the POS (point of sale). In a way yes it is safer to shop online....provided the webstore you are purchasing through performs at least 128 bit encryption and are authenticated via a Certificate. A Digital Certificate ensures the webstore is infact who they claim and is not some entity posing or impersonating the webstore. Certificate Authentication is like an online identity verification. "Trusted" third party companies verify and manage this identification authentication for your safety.
In ten years the thought of being overly concerned about buying online will seem sort of silly. It is the way the internet, and world will perform around as much as 50% of it's purchasing business. Every year it gets harder and harder to commit fraud, or hack into a SET (secure electronic transaction). SET is a security standard developed by MasterCard and Visa in securing online credit card transactions. SET has been developed jointly by Visa and MasterCard as a method to secure payment card transactions over open networks. The customer is given an electronic wallet also known as a "digital certificate" and a transaction is conducted and verified using a combination of digital certificates and digital signatures among the purchaser, a merchant (the seller), and the purchaser's bank ensuring privacy and confidentiality. SET uses a special Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) which is an encryption protocol. This protocol uses a set of "keys" to encrypt and decrypt the data sent between the parties involved. All of this makes it very hard not only to intercept the information but as well to decrypt it if this occurred. In order for the information to be read the key would have to be "cracked" or duplicated by the interceptor. A 128 bit key can have 340 billion billion billion billion possible values.
Hence, reproducing the key which would be needed to read the data sent in your transaction would be extremely difficult. Without high end clustering (using many computers simultaneously in a pool to work on a task, or set of tasks) it would be virtually impossible by any single hacker using a single or even small group of computers to crack a 128 bit SSL key used in SET.

This article is meant to provide an overview of the security involved in a basic SET online purchase. It is meant to inform the person who is concerned about his or her safety about buying items or purchasing services online.