The fine detail on international prepaid calling card secure shopping.

Until recently, people used a technique called symmetric key cryptography to secure information being transmitted across public networks in order to make international prepaid calling card shopping more secure. This method involves encrypting and decrypting a international prepaid calling card message using the same key, which must be known to both parties in order to keep it private. The key is passed from one party to the other in a separate transmission, making it vulnerable to being stolen as it is passed along.

With public-key cryptography, separate keys are used to encrypt and decrypt a message, so that nothing but the encrypted message needs to be passed along. Each party in a international prepaid calling card transaction has a *key pair* which consists of two keys with a particular relationship that allows one to encrypt a message that the other can decrypt. One of these keys is made publicly available and the other is a private key. A international prepaid calling card order encrypted with a person's public key can't be decrypted with that same key, but can be decrypted with the private key that corresponds to it. If you sign a transaction with your bank using your private key, the bank can read it with your corresponding public key and know that only you could have sent it. This is the equivalent of a digital signature. While this takes the risk out of international prepaid calling card transactions if can be quite fiddly. Our recommended provider listed below makes it all much simpler

Netscape Corporation has created the best known secure server technologies. It uses a security protocol called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) that provides data encryption, server authentication, message integrity and optional client authentication for a TCP/IP connection. When a client seeking to purchase international prepaid calling card connects with a secure server, they exchange a *handshake* which initiates a secure session. With this protocol, the same server system can run both secure and unsecured web servers simultaneously. This means an international prepaid calling card organization or company can provide some information to all users using no security, and other information that is secured. For example, a business that sells international prepaid calling card online can have its storefront (merchandise catalog) unsecured, but ordering and payment forms can be secure.

Why are these developments important? As the Internet becomes a way to buy and sell international prepaid calling card products and services, financial transactions become essential. Right now, most international prepaid calling card transactions involve the exchange of credit card information, either directly over the network, or by phone, to complete a transaction initiated online. Eventually, you will be able to use cash as well as credit, directly over the network.