The uneasy future of online security

The face of online security will change drastically, Jim Bidzos, founder and chairman of trusted certificates vendor VeriSign, said in a keynote speech last Wednesday at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.

"In the '70s in enterprises, there were mainly mainframes. The Internet, due to good work by Al Gore, who will be speaking later, was then just beginning," he said. When local area networks came along in the '80s, tokens were introduced and "they were good enough for this kind of access," Bidzos said.

Over time, as the Internet developed, however, the face of security changed, with public key encryption, intrusion detection and firewall technology being developed. Again, those were good enough for the times. "It's like your credit cards; despite the amount of credit card fraud occurring, the security is good enough to keep losses through fraud to an acceptable level," he said.

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