Encryption breaks

[cwk9]

The key is to catch the data in its unencrypted state.

[wildfreeze87]

[glowpurple]to break a encryption u need a good decoder and i am not about some program that hacks in an trys to find a crack hole. i am talking about a program that trys to match all numbers 0-9 and all the letters of the alphabet upper and lower case form. very much like putting a 10 000 peice puzzle together it might be long but it might work. another thing is u MUST be in a sucure sever. and u will need 10 or more firewalls all diferent types or get 2 1000 bit firewalls so u don't get burnt. i know that it is very very hard to get but keep looking!!! [/glowpurple]

[ac1dsp3ctrum]

Actually its like putting together a 295,147,905,179,352,825,856 peice puzzle (correct me if I counted wrong... I used a standard 16-number cc# which might be encrypted with 1024bit)
And wildfreeze, can you please not post fully in purple, glowing text... Its worse on the eyes that CAPS

[darkes]

To come back to the original question about encryption security using a normal browser (IE, Netscape, Opera etc.), SSL is the protocol that is used as Ouroboros pointed out. SSL itself is not tied to a specific encryption algorithm - it just defines how two computers will talk to each other using encrypted data and sits on top of TCP/IP, and includes things such as exchanging certificates (digital signatures), and ways to prevent spoofing of data i.e. inserting a bogus packet into the data stream. Incidentally, this means that packet sniffing an SSL link will only give encrypted data, as all the TCP/IP packets contain encrypted data.
In practice, all normal browsers use a 128 bit RSA algoritm, but if you really wanted to there is nothing to stop you setting up an SSL link that used some sort of 1024 bit security.
As ever, a search on google for say, "SSL algorithm" will give details of how this all works - if you follow some of the links they will take you into details of known weakness, and the maths behind it all. The weaknesses are not really significant for you or I, as you would still need vast computing power to crack the 128 bit algoritm by brute force - it only really becomes possible if you have something else to go on e.g. you can make a good guess as to how one of the (private) keys was generated. Switching to a 1024 bit algoritm won't help much if there is still a weakness in the way that the key(s) are generated.
This would reduce your 295,147,905,179,352,825,856 puzzle to something more managable - to continue the analogy, you would still be trying to fit the same number of pieces together, but you would start off with a fuzzy picture as to what the completed puzzle should look