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Seems like dedicated lines would be more secure. More expensive, too, but sometimes security should trump expense. or How stupid do you have to be to trust co

Seems like dedicated lines would be more secure. More expensive, too, but sometimes security should trump expense. or How stupid do you have to be to trust core financial information to public communication methods?

jacquesm 12y ago
> More expensive, too, but sometimes security should trump expense. All security is a trade-off between 'enough security' and expense. There is no such thing as 'absolute security', if dedicated lines are not measurably more secure than the public internet then choosing to route your traffic via the net rather than via dedicated lines is the right decision. Banks are in general not 'stupid' when it comes to what they do with their data, they try to do their best within the triangle of security, expenses and technical demands. If you think using 'public communication methods' for the transport of core financial information is stupid then I guess you are also against banks that are connected to the internet using websites, against banks that use 'swiftnet' (SWIFT is a provider of a secure network used to transfer financial information between banks, which - surprise - has been compromised in the past by the NSA and where payments in transit between two other countries has been seized by the USA because those payments violated a US policy). In the end, at some point a bank will have to trust the wires and the parties that maintain those wires. From a banks point of view an operator like SWIFT and the public internet vary in degree as to their security but which one to use will always be a business decision and as noted above even SWIFT is not 100% secure and might in some ways be less secure than the public internet. I also wonder how you propose banks communicate with their customers and with their branch offices. Here is a nice page on the connectivity options a SWIFT partner gives to its customers all the way from DSL to dedicated lines: http://www.orange-business.com/en/swift-connectivity http://www.orange-business.com/en/swift-connectivity And dedicated lines can be tapped too, so in the end the encryption matters more than the physical connection.
ceejayoz 12y ago
> How stupid do you have to be to trust core financial information to public communication methods? The CIA got a lot of info out of the Soviet Union by tapping their military undersea communications cables, which carried unencrypted data as they assumed they were protected. Sometimes the dangers of public communications methods lead to better security in that you have to consider it rather than assuming you're safe.
PeterisP 12y ago
Dedicated lines are exactly as secure as the internet - i.e., not secure, so there's no difference on that regard. From a security viewpoint, they're treated as unsecure as a number of third parties (the network providers and such) may have access to it; so you have to encrypt all data in transit in the exact same manner as you would on an internet connection. In finance, you get dedicated lines for bandwidth/latency guarantees (i.e., no congestion out of your control) or for redundancy and fault tolerance; not for security.

jacquesm 12y ago

> More expensive, too, but sometimes security should trump expense. All security is a trade-off between 'enough security' and expense. There is no such thing as 'absolute security', if dedicated lines are not measurably more secure than the public internet then choosing to route your traffic via the net rather than via dedicated lines is the right decision. Banks are in general not 'stupid' when it comes to what they do with their data, they try to do their best within the triangle of security, expenses and technical demands. If you think using 'public communication methods' for the transport of core financial information is stupid then I guess you are also against banks that are connected to the internet using websites, against banks that use 'swiftnet' (SWIFT is a provider of a secure network used to transfer financial information between banks, which - surprise - has been compromised in the past by the NSA and where payments in transit between two other countries has been seized by the USA because those payments violated a US policy). In the end, at some point a bank will have to trust the wires and the parties that maintain those wires. From a banks point of view an operator like SWIFT and the public internet vary in degree as to their security but which one to use will always be a business decision and as noted above even SWIFT is not 100% secure and might in some ways be less secure than the public internet. I also wonder how you propose banks communicate with their customers and with their branch offices. Here is a nice page on the connectivity options a SWIFT partner gives to its customers all the way from DSL to dedicated lines: http://www.orange-business.com/en/swift-connectivity http://www.orange-business.com/en/swift-connectivity And dedicated lines can be tapped too, so in the end the encryption matters more than the physical connection.

ceejayoz 12y ago

> How stupid do you have to be to trust core financial information to public communication methods? The CIA got a lot of info out of the Soviet Union by tapping their military undersea communications cables, which carried unencrypted data as they assumed they were protected. Sometimes the dangers of public communications methods lead to better security in that you have to consider it rather than assuming you're safe.

PeterisP 12y ago

Dedicated lines are exactly as secure as the internet - i.e., not secure, so there's no difference on that regard. From a security viewpoint, they're treated as unsecure as a number of third parties (the network providers and such) may have access to it; so you have to encrypt all data in transit in the exact same manner as you would on an internet connection. In finance, you get dedicated lines for bandwidth/latency guarantees (i.e., no congestion out of your control) or for redundancy and fault tolerance; not for security.