Securing electronic data interchange

One of the growing areas of computer technology is electronic data interchange (EDI). Electronic data interchange is the electronic transfer of data from one agent to another. One of the most important problems with computer programs today is that they are not reliable. The reason for this is quite simple. Computer programs are built to solve particular problems and these problems can be quite large. By large we mean having lots of constraints, cases and rules as to what constitutes the problem. Real‐world problems are so complex that it is hard to be sure that when a program has been built it will never fail for an input that has not been taken into account. Hence, reliability of computer programs for EDI has serious implications because if a program fails to work then this can lead to problems with security. If the field of computer science concentrates on better techniques for increasing computer reliability then we will be able to build more reliable and secure programs for EDI.