An English translation digest (October 1999), by Kostas M Kutrakis,
of the Greek text found in http://www.egnatiabank.gr/webshop/demo/.
Original text copyright by Egnatia Bank, Greece.
Below figure shows how WebShop behaves during a Customer attempt to
make a purchase, and pay using his VISA credit card.
At fist, Customer will be asked to give personal info (Name,
Address, etc). This personal info will be transmitted, from
Merchant's site to Egnatia Bank server, through https (SSL, 40-bit
encryption), therefore achieving a satisfactory security level for this
info which is not sensitive. It is recommended that the same security
level (SSL) be used during Customer-Merchant communications, but this is
not mandatory.
Then, Customer is asked to give his VISA number, expiration date and
owner's name. At this point WebShop has already established and took
control of an additional communication channel, through which the data
will be transmitted and the processing will be completed. This channel
(shown brown in above figure) utilises the highest security level
currently available in Europe, supporting asymmetric cryptography
128-bit algorithms.