E-commerce and encryption: Barriers to growth

As clearly the marketplace for e-business is global, there is a strong need to provide interoperability and uniformity between local legislation and the requirements of the global community. The key to a truly international, e-business infrastructure is the use of strong encryption to protect information in transit and to authenticate users by means of electronic IDs. For the UK to achieve the Government's stated objective of becoming the world's best environment for electronic trading by 2002, efforts must be focused on authentication and confidentiality of information which will form the basis of e-business. To do this will require standards to allow interoperability between Certificate Authorities and a relaxation in the legitimate use of strong encryption. Efforts must be made to increase the standing of digital signatures and make them equivalent to hand-written signatures.