[FYI] Did Encryption Empower These Terrorists?

[lynn.wheeler at firstdata.com]

of course, the other problem is that a substantial part is the "customer at
risk" (not just merchant at risk exposure as the result of any merchant
implementation short comings) .... and there is currently no obvious way
that a customer can determine what, if any, security standards a merchant
might have implemented.

as mentioned in the various previous references ... what is at risk  ...
effectively proportional to the aggregate of the account credit limits ...
for all accounts that happened to have been stored in any account master
file ... is significantly larger than any particular merchant may have
directly at risk because of a security breach. in the "security
proportional to risk" theory .... the entity that has the risk should have
control over the security measures, those security measures should be
proportional to what they have at risk, and the cost of those security
measures should also be proportional to the risk.

A complex, multi-system internet web implementation may represent a
significantly greater cost than the direct busines value a merchant may be
doing on the internet (not to mention the cost of the care and feeding of
such an implementation).  I would claim that any impression that such an
implementation is required is proof that what is at risk (value represented
by the account master file) is not directly related to what any merchant
might have at risk with putting up a merchant web server. Furthermore, I
would claim that it would be possible to find account master files
(regardless of the volume of a merchant's internet business) that
represents a risk level higher than the merchant direct risk ... and
therefor there will always be merchants (at all business size segments)
that find it difficult to provide security proportional to that risk.







This is simply bad design - there should be no "account number master
file" on the web server!

Cheers,

Ben.

--
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff



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