How secure is encryption?

Posted by Stomped on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Stomped
Published on 2010-05-19T22:25:05Z Indexed on 2010/05/19 22:30 UTC
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encryption

Let me preface this by saying I know nothing about encryption. I understand the basic concept of public key / private key encryption but I don't how easily it can be broken, if at all. If one were to believe the movies, encrypted data can be broken by a teenager with a decent computer in a few hours.

I have a client who wants credit card information sent via email - encrypted of course, but I'm still not feeling terribly good about the idea. I feel it would be safer to store the info on the VPS, but even then its an unmanaged server and there's nobody watching it who knows much about security.

So can anyone tell me if there's a safe way to store and/or send this data out?

Thanks

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