Shopping Cart Technology - What is 128-bit Encryption?

Shopping cart technology has come a long way, but do you know what a shopping cart service’s claim to be secure really means? If you’ve done any research on the topic of security on the web, you’ve likely run across the term 128-bit encryption. It sounds fancy and maybe a bit mysterious to a layperson. However, in reality it has a very basic meaning.

When information on the web is passed in a secure fashion, it means that the data is encrypted before it is sent out over the Internet. Shopping cart technology uses an algorithm, or formula for altering the data into a code. When the data reaches its destination, an algorithm then decrypts the data back into its original form. In some cases, the encrypting and decrypting algorithms are the same. In most applications, however, the encrypting and decrypting algorithms differ.

When information is encrypted or decrypted using an algorithm, the computer has to have a key in order to make or translate the changes to the data’s form. Shopping cart technology uses the key along with the algorithm to either alter or translate the data. In Internet applications, this key is stored in set of binary numbers. The number of bits of encryption means the number of binary digits used to store the encryption key.

In the not so distant past, server and shopping cart technology used 40-bit encryption. Thus the keys for use by encryption and decryption algorithms were stored in a string of 40 binary digits. An example of a 40-bit key would be:

00100100 01001101 01110110 01101101 10110101 

A 128-bit key in shopping cart technology would have 128 such binary digits:

01001010 01001010 11010101 01011010 11010100 01001101 00110110 10101010 101011011 10100011 00101010 11010111 010110101 01011010 10110101 00101101

In 40-bit encryption, for example, there are 240 or 1,099,511,627,776 possible keys that an algorithm could use. That means if you randomly chose a key to feed a decryption algorithm you would have about a one-in-a-trillion chance of it being the right one and the associated data being decrypted correctly. This may seem like a lot, but with the speed of some computers it is possible to break this code by trying every key until the right one is found.

For 128-bit encryption there are 2128 or 3.40282366920938E+38 possible keys. The chances of a randomly selected key being the right one are astronomical. And to try every combination, even with the use of the fastest computers available to hackers, would not be feasible.

With the rising speed of computers, it’s possible that shopping cart technology may have to increase its key size above the currently common 128-bit sometime within the next decade. There is no doubt, however, that companies who use shopping cart technology will increase their key sizes well before it becomes a security issue. Once people learn what the “128-bit encryption” means, the demand for the “bigger and better” concept of longer, more secure keys will follow very close behind.