A Perspective Analysis of Cryptographic Algorithms in Online Transaction

E-commerce and m-commerce transactions are growing at an explosive rate. The success of these depends on how transactions are carried out in the most secured manner. As the popularity of the Web increases, the Web will continue to evolve from a means of providing an easy way of accessing (and publishing) information on the Internet to a virtual marketplace where everything can be bought or sold, just like in the physical world. In order to ensure privacy, there needs to be security. The market already provides several security tools, such as the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol developed by Netscape. Another example is Pretty Good Privacy. Such security tools can help protect privacy by preventing access to the information for non-authorized parties. But privacy requires more than that. There also need to be ways of controlling the access to and the distribution of information. This paper presents how message level security is achieved in web services interactions and evaluated a number of commonly used cryptographic algorithms to determine which are most suitable for the task. The implementation of a hybrid algorithm is performed by combining both the symmetric key algorithm of AES and the asymmetric key algorithm of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). This hybrid algorithm that has been implemented also considers takes care of the integrity of data using MD5 algorithm.