ANZ, was Re: [plug] Star Office and 5.1 and the registration

Trevor Phillips phillips at central.murdoch.edu.au
Fri Jun 4 17:53:01 WST 1999


Christian wrote:
> 
> Bret was telling me that they it through a page served from an
> SSL-enabled web server and also showed me some emails from the ANZ staff
> who were telling him that it as using 128 bit encryption, despite the
> fact that International browsers only do 40-bit.  Can anyone suggest a
> reason for this anomaly? (other than the ANZ staff are clueless/lying
> which hopefully is not the case).

Westpac/Challenge also use Web-forms and claim they have 128 bit
encryption, and went on like they had a very special Server certificate
to do it. I'm not sure if this means the browser is happy with it that
way, but from what I've seen, they don't use Java or even Javascript
(maybe a little). All in all a nice clean-cut system. This is mostly
second-hand; it's my Wife who uses it a lot. ^_^

Myself, I'm with National, who use a java applet, yet don't support
Linux. I'm quite impressed by their phone staff; most queries I had were
answered, and one to the point of my embharrasment! I'd reinstalled
Netscape, redownloaded their applet, and started using it, but the
Netscape Padlock wasn't "closed", so without thinking about it too hard
gave their Internet Support line a call and asked why it wasn't secure??
They rightly pointed out that the Applet has its own encryption as the
browser encryption wasn't strong enough for them (and I promptly kicked
myself).

Even so, for Internet banking sometimes I think they DO go over the top
a bit. It's mostly a glorified phone banking system, and it's not like
we use encrypted phone lines or anything. I once heared a stat (back in
the early Visa online purchases days) that there's more chance of
someone listening in on your Visa purchase over the phone, than someone
getting the info out of an unencrypted E-mail ...

-- 
. Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ . 
: CWIS Technical Officer         -           T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au : 
| IT Services                       -               Murdoch University | 
 >------------------- Member of the #SAS# & #CFC# --------------------<
| On nights such as this, evil deeds are done. And good deeds, of     /
| course. But mostly evil, on the whole.                             /
 \      -- (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)                          /


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