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Retailers B*tch Slap PCI Security Standards Council, If You Believe Them

Rich October 5, 2007 No Comments

From Bill Brenner at TechTarget (who never calls anymore now that I’m independent- where’s the love?). From the letter, written by NRF Chief Information Officer David Hogan: “All of us – merchants, banks, credit card companies and our customers – want to eliminate credit card fraud. But if the goal is to make credit card data less vulnerable, the ultimate solution is to stop requiring merchants to store card data in the first place. With this letter, we are officially putting the credit card industry on notice. Instead of making the industry jump through hoops to create an impenetrable fortress, retailers want to eliminate the incentive for hackers to break into their systems in the first place.” The letter notes that credit card companies typically require retailers to store credit card numbers anywhere from one year to 18 months to satisfy card company retrieval requests. According to NRF, retailers should have a choice as to whether or not they want to store credit card numbers at all. This is an exceptionally great idea. I’ve been covering PCI since the start and never realized that one of the reasons retailers were keeping card numbers was because of the credit card companies themselves. I’m not fully convinced they really mean it. I’ve worked with hundreds of retailers of all sizes over the years, and many keep card numbers for reasons other than the credit card company requirements. Most of their systems are built on using card numbers as customer identifiers, and removing them is a monumental task (one that some forward-looking retailers are actually starting). Retailers often use card numbers to validate purchases and perform refunds. Not that they have to, but I wonder how many are really willing to make this change? I’ve long thought that the PCI program was designed more to reduce the risks of the credit card companies than to protect consumers. There are many other ways we could improve credit card security aside from PCI, such as greater use of smart cards and PIN-based transactions. Fortunately, even badly motivated actions can have positive effects, and I think PCI is clearly improving retail security. PCI, and credit card company practices, really push as much liability on the retailers and issuing banks as possible. Retailers are challenging them on multiple fronts, especially transaction fees. This is the kind of challenge I like to see- eliminating stored card numbers removes a huge risk (but not all risk, since the bad guys can still attack on a transaction basis), would reduce compliance costs, and simplify infrastructures. We traditionally talk about four ways to respond to risk- transfer, avoid, accept, mitigate. As a martial artists I have to admit I prefer avoiding a punch than blocking it, getting hit, or having someone else take it on the chin for me. Share:

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Slashdot Bias And Much Ado About Nothing (PGP Encryption Issue)

Rich October 5, 2007 No Comments

I’m sitting here working out of the library (it’s closer to the bars for happy hour), when a headline on Slashdot catches my eye: Undocumented Bypass in PGP Whole Disk Encryption“PGP Corporation’s widely adopted Whole Disk Encryption product apparently has an encryption bypass feature that allows an encrypted drive to be accessed without the boot-up passphrase challenge dialog, leaving data in a vulnerable state if the drive is stolen when the bypass feature is enabled. The feature is also apparently not in the documentation that ships with the PGP product, nor the publicly available documentation on their website, but only mentioned briefly in the customer knowledge base. Jon Callas, CTO and CSO of PGP Corp., responded that this feature was required by unnamed customers and that competing products have similar functionality.” OMG!!!! WTF!!!! Evil backdoors in PGP!!!! Say it ain’t so!!!! Oh, wait a moment. It’s just the temp bypass feature that every single enterprise-class whole disk encryption product on the market supports. I love Slashdot, it’s one of the only sources I read religiously, but on occasion the hype/bias gets to me a little. The CTO of PGP responded well, and I’ll add my outsider’s support. Full disk encryption is a must-have for laptops, but it does come with a bit of a cost. When you encrypt the system, the entire OS is encrypted and you need a thin operating system to boot when you turn on the PC, have the user authenticate, then decrypt and load the primary operating system. Works pretty well, except it interferes with some management tasks like restoring backups and remote updates. Thus all the encryption companies have a feature that allows you to turn off authentication for a single boot- when you need to install an update and reboot the user logs the system in, updates are pushed down and installed, the system reboots without the user logging in, and the bypass flag cleared for the next boot. Otherwise the user would have to sit in front of their machine and enter their password on every reboot cycle. Sure, that would be more secure, but much less manageable- and the risk of data leaking at just the right moment is pretty small. A few vendors, notably Credent, don’t encrypt the entire drive to deal with this problem, but I don’t consider this issue significant enough to discount whole disk encryption solutions like PGP, CheckPoint/Pointsec, Utimaco, etc. This isn’t a back door or a poorly thought out design feature- it’s a reasonable trade-off of risk to solve a well-known management problem. PGP kind of pisses me off sometimes, but I have to support them on this one. Here’s PGP’s documentation. In short, yes- it’s a security risk, but it’s a manageable risk and not significant enough to warrant the hype. Especially since you can disable (or simply not use) the feature in high-security situations. Share:

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