Professor Serge Vaudenay of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne found a way to unlock a message encrypted using Secure Socket Layer protocol technology, according to a posting on the research institute's Web site.

However, U.S. cryptography experts said it was not the version of security that most consumers use to shop online.

Rather, it is a version that only affects e-mail, is limited in scope and not widely used, said Professor Avi Rubin, who is technical director of the Information Security Institute at Maryland's Johns Hopkins University.

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