On the importance of protecting personal information privacy: A lightweight and portable implementation of cryptographic systems

During the past decade, the issue of personal information privacy has drawn considerable attention among law, public policy, marking, organizational behavior and information systems. Unfortunately, the lack of consumer confidence in protecting personal information privacy has been identified as a major problem hampering the growth of e-commerce. Despite the importance of understanding the nature of public concerns for information privacy, this topic has received little attention in the information systems community. To fill the gap in the literature, we design a lightweight and portable cryptographic system, which can protect personal information privacy for users of Internet and computers. We choose four-tier system architecture and divide the system into five functional modules, i.e. login module, interface module, encrypt module, decrypt module and I/O module. In our system, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is adapted to encrypt and decrypt information, since it has been adopted by the U. S. government and is now used worldwide. Based on Microsoft . NET Framework 4.5, we use Microsoft C\# to implement the system. Experimental results show that our design is lightweight and portable, which can protect the information privacy of users.