Author: David Froud

If you’re a security professional and there’s a new phrase or product going around with which you are unfamiliar, there’s a better than even chance you won’t need that thing. Ever.

The reasons are myriad, but the major offenders are:

  1. It’s something that product vendors invented to scare you into thinking you’ve missed something; [e.g. Advanced Persistent Threats]
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  2. It’s something Gartner was paid to promote into a magic quadrant of some sort, [e.g. most of Gartner’s output]
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  3. It sells column inches, or;
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  4. It’s something you already have but now it has a sexier name. [e.g. Logging and Monitoring is now Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM)]

For me, this pet peeve started with ‘The Cloud’. Suddenly everything had to be “In The Cloud”, that adoption of Cloud-based services was the only way to stay up with your competition …blah blah blah. Basically The Cloud was the only way you were going to stay in business in the digital age.

“But wait David!” I hear you gasp; “Isn’t The Cloud just an application on the Internet? Haven’t we had this capability for, I don’t know, DECADES!?!” Why yes Dear Reader, we HAVE had this capability for decades, but clearly you didn’t know you needed it until it had a fancy name and had vendors shoving the concept down your throat!

I know of organisations who quite literally renamed their ‘Managed Security Services’ to ‘Cloud Security Services’ without changing a SINGLE piece of infrastructure or a single process. And yes, this hid all manner of sins, but for some reason the new name stopped clients asking difficult questions like; “Can you tell me how it works?”

By sheer coincidence, I gave a webinar last week titled “Ignore Future Attacks, Fix Your Broken Security Program First”, it could just as easily be called “Ignore Buzzwords, Fix Your Broken Security Program First” and the content would be almost identical. We need to stop focusing on the new when we usually don’t even know what assets we’re trying to protect, who has access to what, or what any given system should look like from a normalised perspective.

Business needs information in context in order to compete, and the data that makes up that information is stored somewhere on a physical system. I don’t care if it’s virtualised, containerised or whatever-ised, it’s still a piece of hardware running an operating system sitting in a room somewhere (yes, I know it can be distributed). Nevertheless, there is NOTHING you need outside of an established good security practice to protect this data from what’s out there now, and what will be out there in the future. REGARDLESS of its name!

Segmentation, configuration standards, access control, logging and monitoring and a host of other old fashioned and boring names all boil down to one thing; baseline. What should a system look like all day every day, and how do I report anything different. No innovation in security capability (i.e buzzword) will be of any use whatsoever if you don’t have the basics right, because you’ll have no idea what you have, let alone how it should normally behave.

Ignore the hype, ignore the press, ignore Gartner and their ilk, focus on the stuff that you’ve likely relegated to a ‘previous generation’s problems’. They are still your problems too.

After last week’s blog, where I challenged the relevance of the PCI DSS v3.2 (and basically the relevance of the entire standard itself), I received a number of comments questioning my reasoning. As is always the case, opinions differ, and while I have no intention of trying to change the mind of those who disagree with me, I will at least attempt to put together a more lucid argument around my position. This will consist of a summary of the various points I have made on this topic in numerous blogs over the last 2.5 years.

First though, let me stress that I do not believe the PCI DSS is all bad. I do believe it is managed poorly, and that it in no way represents a valid security program / framework, but in reality, it was never designed as such. It was a minimal set of security controls the cards brands wanted in place around their data in order to keep government regulators off their backs. Basically smoke and mirrors with some minimal risk reduction thrown in for appearances.

These are my Top 10 arguments for the irrelevance of PCI:

  1. 50+ Year Old Technology: You wouldn’t gut-refurbish a house you intend to knock down would you? So why would you spend a fortune on PCI compliance when it’s clear you’ll need whole new payment channels for mobile, the Internet of Things, and whatever comes after that? Cardholder data cannot be protected at a reasonable cost …ever, and as the influence of the card schemes wanes, the thieves will move on to whatever is most popular.
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  2. QSA Training: Almost, but not quite, an oxymoron, and one of the biggest reasons PCI became such a waste of time. The requirement for 5 years of security experience on a resume/CV was completely inadequate (and often faked). QSAs needed to be security consultants first and foremost, what we got was a bunch of auditors who completely missed the point. The point should have been that the DSS was a MINIMUM set of controls, and that real security was never to be found in compliance alone. The QSA training is absolutely pitiful.
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    Why does no-one question the fact that not one QSA on the planet is an expert in all 12 requirements? Every assessor has skills and weaknesses, yet they are permitted to assess the compliance of all areas. No client wants to pay for TWO assessors, and a minuscule number of QSAs actually sub the validation of their weaker subjects. Why? Because they don’t have to.
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  3. Conflict of Interest: There is still a LOT of money in PCI, billions in fact, and there are many QSA companies out there that can credit their entire existence on the back of that money. The competition is fierce, and given the fact that every organisation going through compliance has 100% control over the commercials, means that QSAs have to be extremely ‘pragmatic’. I have personally had organisations tell me that if I did not loosen my interpretation they would find someone who would. They were dumped as clients immediately of course.
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    The second conflict of interest is that you can sell your client a firewall [for example], manage it for them, monitor the output, vulnerability scan and penetration test it, AND assess it for compliance. No due diligence required on how you perform checks and balances, all you have to do is be up front about it. Utterly ridiculous.
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  4. Risk Assessment: The PCI DSS is the result OF a risk assessment, one performed by the card schemes themselves. That’s what the control requirements ARE! If it was a true risk assessment, the PCI assessment itself would be a choice, not mandatory, and there would exist an ability to accept residual risk. There isn’t. In fact, the only point of the risk assessment in PCI is to decide if you need to go above and beyond, and who in their right mind would do that if they didn’t have to?
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  5. Scope: It is the role of any good QSA to help a client reduce the scope of their assessment as much as humanly possible. This makes perfect sense from a risk-to-cardholder-data perspective, but when ALL a client’s focus is on the remaining CDE, the rest of the business suffers. In most organisations personal data is far more prevalent, and with the GDPR looming, a much more sensitive asset. Only an organisation-wide security program makes sense, one that’s in line with business goals, not just a single set of commercial obligations.
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  6. Governance: Easy, there isn’t any, and the word does not even appear in the PCI DSS. Not once. How are you supposed to run a risk assessment, determine control implementation in line with business continuity plans AND enforce repeatable processes to keep the controls in place without some form of governance?
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  7. Weak Controls: I have covered these ad nauseam; from the continued use of the word ‘periodic’, to lack of management systems framework, to logging and monitoring, the control requirements have always been, and will always be inadequate for real security. Perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad if the SSC didn’t keep saying things like; “[PCI] provides the most complete set of data security standards available globally.”, which in my view is nothing short of irresponsible.
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  8. Validation & Sampling: Sampling is supposed to be a privilege, not a right, and sampling starts at 100% until a client has earned a reduction. Systems that are installed the same, kept the same, managed the same, monitored centrally, ALL must be in place before sampling is an option, but try telling a client they must provide 10,000 pieces of evidence to achieve compliance (see 3. Conflict of Interest above).
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    Don’t get me started on the annual ‘point-in-time’ aspect. What security standard could possibly accept validation evidence that’s 364 days old? Nothing in the PCI DSS says you can’t.
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  9. Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity: These receive the very barest of lip-service, and frankly, even that is none of the card brand’s business. Beyond incident response, a company’s ability to get back online and stay in business is their own affair, so why even put “* Business recovery and continuity procedures” in 12.10.1 if not to create another illusion of best practice?
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  10. Threat Landscape: With a 3 year life-cycle and a complete inability to change radically, the PCI DSS is, and will always be inadequate to address current, and especially zero-day, threats. PCI compliance would spit out the back of a security program done well, ‘just compliance’ will always fall well short.

Basically PCI compliance is like being pressured into hiring the CEO’s son, no matter how lazy or incompetent the kid is, you can’t fire them. All you can do is marginalise them so they don’t actually do any real harm.

I have used the phrase “I hate PCI!” for almost 10 years now, and given that PCI has been directly responsible for funding my career, I may seem more than a little ungrateful. But it’s not about hating PCI, or even the SSC, it’s about making those who need help most pause, hopefully laugh, and above all, listen.

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Not feeling very creative today, but luckily the Payment Card Industry can always be relied upon to dish out plenty of blodder.

With a stunning twist, the SCC announced the potential release of the DSS v3.2 as early as March. It was greeted by the industry with a resounding; “Meh”. And quite rightly, have you read the potential changes? They are;

“…evaluating additional multi-factor authentication for administrators within a Cardholder Data Environment (CDE); incorporating some of the Designated Entities Supplemental Validation (DESV) criteria for service providers; clarifying masking criteria for primary account numbers (PAN) when displayed; and including the updated migration dates for SSL/early TLS that were published in December 2015.”

While I understand this is part of their new program to; “…[move] towards a system of smaller, more incremental modifications to address things like the EMV roll-out in the US, rather than larger, wholesale updates.“, when was the last time you saw a large update? You could point to the change from v2.0 to v3.0, but you would only be showing your ignorance of the ‘ROC Reporting Instructions for PCI DSS v2.0’, the incorporation of which accounted for 95% of the difference between the 2 versions (take a look at this if you don’t believe me; PCI DSS v3.0 – Mapping to v2.0_v07NOV13).

But let’s handle each of these ‘changes’ in turn:

  1. Evaluating additional multi-factor – Note the use of the word ‘evaluating’, meaning nothing will actually change for some time. Is multi-factor auth a good idea for all privileged access? Yes, so let’s hope they actually enforce this one properly.
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  2. Incorporating some of the Designated Entities Supplemental Validation (DESV) – For ALL service providers, or just the ones to whom the DESV already applies? If the former, great, but the DESV is mostly a paperwork and process requirement, not additional controls. Not necessarily a terrible thing, but it depends on which requirements.
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  3.  Clarifying masking criteria – This one stumps me, how do you clarify the exposure of ‘first 6 and last 4’ only?
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  4. Migration for SSL and early TLS –  For to new date of 2018 to make ANY sense they should have left the requirement for offering TLS 1.2 by 2016, but allowing backwards compatibility until the later date. The way it’s written, merchants don’t even have to offer v1.2 of TLS until 2018 which is absolute nonsense.

The PCI DSS has always been, and will always be entirely inadequate to protect critical data assets, but frankly, what choice do the card brands have? They are fully aware of the inadequacy of their plastic in the face of current payment innovations, and the only saving grace delaying their rapid decline is the ignorance of the end consumer themselves. Henry Ford is often attributed the best phrase that sums this up perfectly; “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The average consumer simply has no idea what could replace plastic, but when they do, the changes will be incredibly fast, and permanent.

The PCI DSS can never change dramatically, or the multi-billions spent on compliance to date would all be thrown away. Every organisation on the planet who is currently compliant (or reporting as such to be more accurate) would have to spend countless more billions to bring themselves up to the new standard. There is no way the card brands would survive the backlash. They have painted themselves into a compliance corner that cannot protect their 50 year old technology from the current threat landscape.

Yes of course implementing the PCI DSS controls on all forms of data is better than doing nothing, but barely, and can never and will never represent real security.

You can almost feel it happening, can’t you? Every time there is an introduction of, or a change to some regulation or another, the vultures of the legal, security consulting, and even security product vendors spin up their marketing machines to invent new promises on how they will ‘guide you through the pending minefield’.

The thing is, I in no way blame them. I’ve likened selling security to selling insurance, in that no-one WANTS to buy something that seems to have absolutely no tangible benefit to the bottom line (it does though; How Information Security Enables Transformational Change). This results in a vast majority of organisations taking extreme liberties with the terms ‘reasonable’ and ‘appropriate’, which is as specific as most regulations go in terms of meeting their requirements.

Unfortunately, regulations are written by lawyers, who have a language all of their own. How is an IT Director supposed to translate legal-ese into geek-speak without some help? That’s where a PROPERLY run security program comes in; the translation become almost unnecessary.

I have made statements like this many times; “If an organisation was doing security properly, they would already be [enter regulation name here] compliant.”

Bold statement, but think about it this way:

  1. ALL information security and most compliance regimes relate [at least in part] to the protection of data
  2. The principles of information security have not, and will not ever change
  3. NOT doing these basics is the fault of the organisations, not the regulators (except PCI)

The only thing that’s different from one compliance regime to the next is how you report what you’re doing. PCI requires a very detailed (though mostly meaningless) controls-based Report on Compliance, SoX and HIPAA require something else, and the old Safe Harbor just required a SELF-assessment (and you wonder why it failed…).

Regardless, the underlying validation evidence is the same; policies, procedures, standards, operational integrity, incident response and so on. You are either doing these things or you’re not. And let’s be clear, you should be.

“But they’re moving the goal posts!” is a complaint I frequently hear, and is usually the foundation of an excuse to do nothing. Just because YOU don’t know where the goal posts are doesn’t mean they’ve moved. All that really happened is that every time a regulation comes out and they ask for more and more detail / accountability / transparency etc, it further exposes the fact that you weren’t doing things properly in the first place.

The General Data Protection Directive (GDPR) for example is freaking organisations out with its potentially enormous penalties. Penalties for what? Not using data for its original intent? Not obtaining explicit customer consent? Not LOSING the data in a breach? How is ANY of that unreasonable!?

OK, so the above is a gross simplification of the GDPR, but it’s not far off, and frankly, Privacy Shield will be even easier. If your organisation is not in a position to meet the intent of these data privacy regulations, then you are part of the reason they exist in the first place. And if your security program is in such a state that the vultures have easy picking over the carcass of your IT budget, that’s your fault too.

Non-compliance with any regulatory requirement relevant to data protection is just a symptom of the same underlying problem; a crap security program. Fix that, worry about the reporting afterwards.

In my continuing crusade against greedy and self-serving biometrics vendors – which is absolutely NOT all of them – I figured I would give them a little taste of their own medicine with a ridiculous assertion in the title.

Of course biometrics isn’t dead [I believe it’s still in its infancy] and of course it will only continue to grow in distribution and influence. Its adoption will sky-rocket as mobile devices take over the world and IoT makes thinking for yourself redundant, and I for one am more than happy for it to spend time more in the sun.

What I cannot / will not accept from biometrics:

  1. Its growth at the expense of ANY other form of authentication (without appropriate justification),
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  2. Its false and irresponsible claims to its security, and;
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  3. Its blatant disregard for its ultimate benefactor; the mobile phone

Put to one side for a minute that not ONE legislation / regulation in payments actually requires biometrics (where “strong authentication” is primarily defined as 2-factor), and focus for a second on how biometrics has even made it as far as it has. Simply put, without the mobile phone, there would BE no biometrics in the mainstream.

It’s not like we would all carry around a separate device to perform biometric authentication, would we? No, we wouldn’t, so it’s only because biometrics is so readily available that we even consider it an alternative to passwords. That’s right, an ALTERNATIVE, and for the foreseeable future, one completely driven by consumer preference. No financial institution in their right mind will make biometrics mandatory, probably ever. I certainly wouldn’t.

So if the mobile phone is so all-powerful, why aren’t they attacking passwords? Simple, a) they have no need to, they are the dominant factor, and b) they are smart enough to realise that without the OTHER two factors they are not providing the best solutions possible.

In other words, they get it.

Rather a bleak picture, isn’t it? 1) not required for regulatory compliance, 2) will never be mandatory, only a consumer preference, 3) will never be suitable for some forms of authentication due to false ‘positives’, and; 4) it completely reliant on something else for its distribution. But even with all of this against it, I will embrace biometrics, in all its forms, if it provides me the convenience I crave, with ENOUGH security to transfer the risk to someone else (my bank for example).

And that’s really what it all boils down to; risk. A simple word but one completely misunderstood, and usually handled poorly. Bottom line; if the effort to steal something is greater than its value, it’s safe …enough. That’s all biometrics and passwords provide; security enough, and the amount of security you have to provide for a transaction is directly proportional to the value of the transaction.

For example, why would you use Apple Pay when it requires authentication that the contactless card does not? Is it more convenient? No. Does it provide more value-add services? No. Does it have anywhere near the distribution of plastic? No. Do YOU have to care about the security of contactless? No, you don’t.

Biometrics is, and will always be only a player in the game. While mobile holds most of the cards, any form of biometrics will be beholden to it, so they should play nice.