Securosis Blog

We are happy to announce the availability of Data Encryption 101: A Pragmatic Approach to PCI Compliance.

It struck Rich and myself that data storage is a central topic for PCI compliance which has not gotten a lot of coverage. The security community spends a lot of time discussing the merits of end-to-end encryption, tokenization, and other topics, but meat and potatoes stuff like encryption for data storage is hardly ever mentioned. We feel there is enough ambiguity in the standard to warrant…

In the first part of our series on Understanding and Selecting an Enterprise Firewall, we talked mostly about use cases and new requirements (Introduction, Application Awareness Part 1, and Part 2) driving a fundamental re-architecting of the perimeter gateway.

I bought the iPhone 4 a few months ago and I still love it. And luckily there is a cell phone tower 200 yards north of me, so even if I use my left handed kung fu grip on the antenna, I don’t drop calls. But I decided to keep my older Verizon account as it’s kind of a family plan deal, and I figured just in case the iPhone failed I would have a backup. And I could get rid of all the costly plan upgrades and have just a simple phone. But not so fast! Trying to get rid of the data and texting…

In our last post on application awareness as a key driver for firewall evolution, we talked about the need and use cases for advanced firewall technologies. Now let’s talk a bit about some of the challenges and overlap of this kind of technology. Whether you want to call it disruptive or innovative or something else, introducing new capabilities on existing gear tends to have a ripple effect on everything else. Application awareness on the firewall is no exception.

As mentioned in the Introduction to Understanding and Selecting an Enterprise Firewall, we see three main forces driving firewall evolution. The first two are pretty straightforward and don’t require a lot of explanation or debate: networks are getting faster and thus the perimeter gateways need to get faster. That’s not brain surgery.

Hard to believe it’s September already. As we steam through yet another year, I like to step back and reflect on the technical achievements that have literally changed our life experience. Things like the remote control and pay at the pump. How about the cell phone, which is giving way to a mini-computer that I carry in my pocket? Thankfully it’s much lighter than a PDP-11. And networks, yeah man, always on baby! No matter where you are, you can be connected. But let’s not forget the wonders of…

Today we begin the our next blog series: Understanding and Selecting an Enterprise Firewall.

Yes, really. Shock was the first reaction from most folks. They figure firewalls have evolved about as much over the last 5 years as ant traps. They’re wrong, of course, but most people think of firewalls as old, static, and generally uninteresting. In fact, most security folks begin their indentured servitude looking after the firewalls, where they gain seasoning before anyone lets them touch important…

As a merchant your goal is to protect stored credit card numbers (PAN), as well as other card data such as card-holder name, service code, and expiration date. You need to protect these fields from both unwanted physical (e.g., disk, tape backup, USB) and logical (e.g., database queries, file reads) inspection. And detect and stop misuse if possible, as well.

Back when I started Securosis my first white paper was Understanding and Selecting a DLP Solution. It has been downloaded many thousands of times (about 400 times a month for the first couple years), and I still see it showing up all the time when I talk with clients. (Some people call it the DLP Bible, but if I said that it would be really pretentious). Although the paper is still accurate, it’s time for an update.

Continuing our series on PCI Encryption basics, we delve into the supporting systems that make encryption work. Key management and access controls are important building blocks, and subject to audit to ensure compliance with the Data Security Standard.