Vocabulary Practice: Encryption

Read the text again and answer the questions with some of the words in bold.

Online transactions need to be user-friendly, safe and reliable if you want your costumers to keep using your services. If you cannot provide secure transactions and are unable to protect the cardholder information or any other confidential information of your customers, you will not only lose them but also your reputation.

The SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a security protocol used by many e-commerce businesses to protect the confidential information of their customers. The SSL protocol provides a secure connection between a browser and a server. How can you know that a connection is secure? Electronic certificates are given to companies and websites that are authenticated by certificate authorities (CAs).

SSL secure websites have a small padlock in the URL or a padlock and a green browser bar. In addition, when you switch from an insecure webpage to a secure one, the browser URL changes from http:// to https://. This means that no third party can intercept the data exchanged between the browser and the server.

Once the confidential information is submitted, it is sent to a gateway where encryption takes place. The gateway encrypts the data using a special cipher. The recipient can decode the data by using the same cipher that the sender used to encrypt the information. The encrypted content can only be read by an authorized user who has a key to the encrypted content. Only users who know the cipher and the key can access the data.