Cyber Everything & PCI DSS – The Forgotten Standard?

News and information from the Advent IM team.

Senior Security Consultant for Advent IM and PCI-DSS expert,  Mark Jones gives us his thoughts on the current awareness of this important payment industry standard.

In the current information security climate where everything has ‘cyber’ prefixing the topic e.g. cybersecurity, cyber risk, cyber threats and the list goes on, is it possible organisations have forgotten about existing and very important ‘cyber-related’ standards such as the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)?

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As more and more business is done online in our ‘new’ cyber world – 2015 Online Retail Sales £52 Billion up 16.7% from £45 Billion in 2014 – payment cardholder (CHD) account data security is more important than ever. This includes the need for assured authentication, confidentiality and integrity of payment cardholder information as traditionally granted by the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol over HTTPS padlocked browser sessions in the past 20 years. In 2014, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) determined that SSL and indeed early versions of SSL’s successor, the Transport Layer Security (TLS v1.0) protocol (also referred to as SSL), were found to have serious vulnerabilities with recent high-profile breaches POODLE, Heartbleed and Freak due to weaknesses found within these protocols.

iStock_000015534900XSmallSo, if you are an entity that that stores, transmits or processes Cardholder Data (CHD), specifically the 16 (can be up to 19) digit Primary Account Number (PAN), then you should seek to comply with the latest version v3.1 of the PCI DSS. This version was released in April 2015 by the PCI Security Standards Council (SSC) that removed SSL as an example of strong cryptography and that can no longer be used as a security control after 30 June 2016. However, the migration from SSL and early TLS to TLS v1.1 and 1.2 has caused issues for some organisations hence the SSC update in December 2015[1] that the deadline had been extended for 2 years, with a new end date of 30 June 2018 for existing compliant merchants. However, SSC is at pains to emphasise that this delay is not an extension to hold off migrating to a more secure encryption protocol (as defined by NIST) and entities that can update should do so as soon as possible.

If the entity is an Acquirer (typically the merchant’s bank), Payment Processor, Gateway or Service Provider, then they MUST provide TLS v1.1 or greater as a service offering by June 2016. Additionally, if it is a new PCI DSS implementation (i.e. when there is no existing dependency on the use of vulnerable protocols) then they must be enabled with TLS v1.1 or greater – TLS v1.2 is recommended.

As you can see, PCI DSS can play a significant part in any cyber security programme providing the entity in question is compliant with the latest version 3.1. If you have yet to start, or are part way through a PCI DSS implementation project, what can and should you do NOW? We recommend the following 3 actions:

  • Migrate to a minimum of TLS v1.1, preferably v1.2;
  • Patch TLS software against implementation vulnerabilities; and
  • Configure TLS securely.

If you need any further help and guidance with PCI DSS, please contact Advent IM…

[1] http://blog.pcisecuritystandards.org/pci-changes-date-for-migrating-from-ssl-and-early-tls

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