A study of the security of Internet banking and financial private information in South Korea

The certificate system in South Korea was inaugurated with enactment of the Digital Signature Law on July 1, 1999. To enable a safe e-commerce infrastructure, this law gave digital signatures legal effect, providing a basis for safe e-commerce including online payments and other actions [15]. However, now that portable devices such as smart phones and tablet PCs are rapidly becoming commercialized and browser markets using the Internet are becoming more diverse, accessibility and compatibility of Korean Internet banking for OpenWeb-oriented users have become critical issues. This move is highly novel and is expected to provide an opportunity to review security issues in the Korean financial industry. In addition, there are ongoing efforts in the financial industry to provide banking services using IT technology. However, some users claim that there are fundamental security problems in Korean Internet banking, which arise when certificates escape from their original topics. Therefore, the author would like to provide an objective discussion of these misleading claims and to discuss how to reinforce protection of private financial information, which could become even weaker in the Internet environment.