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I despise PCI-DSS. A friend owns a small business and has a credit card reader. Due to that, we had to build out a separate LAN so that the reader is on its own
by kstrauser 5mo ago
I despise PCI-DSS. A friend owns a small business and has a credit card reader. Due to that, we had to build out a separate LAN so that the reader is on its own precious network, and have to pay an external auditor for a quarterly scan of our external IP. Bullshit past findings were things like “your VPN server supports old encryption algorithms”. “But our clients don’t support them. They select the newer algorithms!” “But they could!” “What do you care? Those clients aren’t even on the same LAN as the scanner.” “PCI-DSS lol!” I have no way of knowing, but I bet the firewall might’ve accidentally blocked the scanning IP from reaching the VPN server port on the retest and called it a day, but surely not.
Basically, Visa and friends externalized their own shitty security and made every other company in the land responsible for wrapping their janky hardware in electronic bubble wrap. A real security framework would’ve said “don’t make a credit card scanner so weak that it can’t survive being on the same LAN as a printer”. Instead, the whole country has to waste billions of dollars mitigating that risk for them.
- akerl_ 5mo ago> Bullshit past findings were things like “your VPN server supports old encryption algorithms”. “But our clients don’t support them. They select the newer algorithms!” Given that downgrade attacks are a massive category of attacks for network protocols, and in fact modern protocols go to great lengths to make them impossible, that doesn’t sound very bullshit at all.
- kstrauser 5mo agoIf a client doesn’t support an algorithm, you can’t force a downgrade to it. A compensating control is that the clients are managed and only support the newest algorithms, and aren’t vulnerable to a downgrade attack. Context is everything. Here, the context is that within this scan environment, it was, in fact, a bullshit finding.
- CodesInChaos 5mo agoThe whole VPN requirement sounds like bullshit to me. The terminal should use secure TLS connections to the servers it communicates with, without relying on the security of the (local) network at all.
- akerl_ 5mo agoLast I checked, a VPN isn’t required by PCI (or really any other compliance regime). The parent commenter’s infrastructure had a VPN. And once you have a VPN and you’re showing it to the auditors as part of your in-scope infra for PCI, asking you to remediate findings for insecure algorithms allowed in the server config is rational.
- kstrauser 5mo agoEh, not really. The VPN was on the same router that gave the card scanner access to phone home to the credit card company. They weren’t related at all. You couldn’t connect to the scanner’s LAN through the VPN. But since they had the same public IP, the vuln scanner counted them as in scope. But in reality, why’s that a problem? Is the credit card scanner so tacitly busted that it can’t coexist with other hosts? Does it not use TLS? Doesn’t it pin TLS certs so that it’s not subject to MITM? Is it listening on ports with vulnerable services? There’s no excuse for the scanner being that delicate. It should be able to service an office LAN. And yet, the PCI-DSS group managed to push the responsibility for their hardware onto the network owners rather than making their own hardware robust. That’s nuts.
- kstrauser 5mo agoIt wasn’t a requirement. They have a VPN server for remote access. The network scan found it and complained even though it’s not related.
- unethical_ban 5mo agoWhy doesn't every bar with a POS system need a separate vlan for their register?
- bob1029 5mo agoIf you process < 20k online transactions per year you can skip a lot of the requirements.