Crypto costs plummeting
For years the high cost of computing power kept data-scrambling technologies out of reach for most businesses.
Encryption, the old saw went, was simply too expensive to use for anything but the most sensitive transactions, such as credit-card purchases on web sites. Companies that used it had to buy more computers just to handle the heavy mathematical computations involved in encrypting traffic they wanted kept private. Encryption, in effect, was the bottleneck that slowed down everything else.
But that's all changed. Sometime in the last two years or so, computing horsepower nearly caught up with the demands of crypto, and even surpassed them in many cases. Today, companies that spend a few hundred dollars on an add-on circuit board to their server can encrypt hundreds of times as many messages at once as in the web's early years.
