A Proposal for Secure Storage of Credit Card Data

A customer asked for advice on how to secure their storage of customer credit card data, which to date has been done essentially in cleartext with no real protections. I was really surprised to find that there just isn't much big-picture advice, just "encrypt the database".

I'm not any kind of crypto expert, and it was frankly a little scary to go down this road even if using known-good algorithms (such as RSA), because it's really easy to do it badly. But, never one to be daunted by my own ignorance, forged ahead.

The result of this adventure is this Tech Tip, which raises issues that the others and I were able to think about. This is more about how to think of the problem in the big picture than it is about a recipe for a solution in a particular case. Indeed: I didn't touch on specific of my customer's environment.

This has circulated privately for some time now, and so far nobody has pointed out any bonehead issues, though many have made suggestions that were good but were not applicable to our environment.

With all the headlines about 50,000 or 500,000 identities being stolen due to poor information security, there ought to be a lot of enterprises thinking about this road: I hope that this paper serves as a useful starting point for them.

Feedback (including "that's a bonehead mistake") welcome.

Unixwiz.net Tech Tip: A Proposal for Secure Storage of Credit Card Data