 There is a saying on the web that goes "On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog". What that means is that it is really hard to prove who you are online, to say you are who you say you are. It can be fun to be anonymous in a chat room, but when you're trying to buy or sell something or do anything really serious on the web, it is very important to make sure everyone knows who everyone else really is. |
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Why is knowing someone's identity online important? There are some people out on the Internet who try and steal things like credit card numbers, passwords and personal information. This is called identity theft. Once they have your secret information they can then go out and pretend they're you, buying and selling and causing all kinds of chaos.  Nobody wants to do business with someone who they think is not who they say they are, especially on the Internet where you can steal and be gone within microseconds. That's why Digital Signatures were created. They verify that you are really you when you're online. How do they work? Digital Signatures are based on what's called Public Key Cryptography. Encryption is just a fancy word for codes or cyphers, except these codes are HUGE, thousands and sometime millions of numbers long. That makes them extremely hard to break or crack. The code is saved in a certain format called a certificate and you get two different codes, your public key that you give out to everyone and your private key that you keep secret and safe. Both the public and private key are unique to each other, which means that only one can decode the other. Encryption is a very secure means of keeping communications between sender and receiver secret from anyone who might be snooping around. But in order for encryption to officially establish you as YOU, the codes need to be issued from a trusted source like a bank, a place that almost everyone trusts with their personal and private information. A company like Digital Signature Trust or VeriSign will issue you a digital signature (sometimes called a digital certificate) after you apply for one and after they perform a couple of simple checks on your to make sure that you're you. Once a person or a business has been issued a certificate, they can then perform certain high-security transactions online like buying a home or setting up a store that takes credit cards for payments. In the future, almost everyone will have some form of a digital signature, just like they have a real signature. |
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Did You Know? The most popular form of Public Key Cryptography is PGP Encryption, which stands for Pretty Good Privacy |
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