from the "ukpipeline" :-)
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UK Indpendent newspaper, 17/8/1995 Internet's 30bn Pound Secret Revealed Charles Arthur Technology Correspondent A French student has cracked the most commonly used encryption system used to pass financial transactions over the Internet, threatening a business forecast to be worth billions of pounds worldwide. Damien Doligez, 27, a PhD student at the Inria research centre near Paris, broke a software "key" used by the Netscape browsing program, which lets users navigate the World Wide Web. With Netscape, Internet users can visit shopping "sites" on the Web and order goods by sending their credit card and address over the network to the site. To prevent anyone picking up those confidential details as they pass through the network, they are encrypted first using a software "key". This is the system used for example by Barclays Bank's "BarclaySquare" project, launched in May, which offers access to eight major retailers. Market research companies forecast that money transmission over the Internet will be worth more than 30bn pounds by 2005. At the launch of BarclaySquare, Roger Alexander, managing director of the unit said: "The encryption method has been rigorously tested by us". But Mr. Doligez has compromised that security by decoding a test example of an encrypted transaction, posted on a number of Internet discussion groups in July. The transaction was scrambled using a digital key 40 bits long, which offers about 1,000 billion ( a million million) possible combinations. Mr Doligez harnessed spare time on 120 workstations and parallel computers. The computers turned up the answer after eight days. "I wouldn't trust my credit card number to Netscape," Mr Doligez told the Independent from Paris yesterday. Netscape Communications, whose flotation on the New York Stock Exchange raised more than $1bn, said "We have always said this would be theoretically possible." [end]