The Immutable kBlog: thoughts on data integrity

We are still about a month and a half before the official 1.2 version of the PCI Data Security Standard is officially published. A couple of days ago a summary of the changes was published in the official PCI Security Standards Council, and so far (this is just a summary) no dramatic changes were presented.

Whenever a new version of this kind of standards is published, different questions appear. For example, what happens with companies that are currently on the certification process? Well, these companies have nothing to worry about, since the PCI Security Standards council states that if a company is under the assessment process they can use the v.1.1 of the standard, even if they finish the assessment process after the official publication of version 1.2 in October.

For us working in the security area, in a snapshot some changes seemed rather obvious, some clarified “blurry” aspects of the standard, but it seems (can’t really say until the official 1.2 is published) to be still some ambiguity out there. I must say that I’m personally disappointed that -in this summary- no changes were mentioned about the needed integrity of the logs. The previous 1.1 version of the standard mention that logs “should be protected against unauthorized modifications”, which makes me wonder: what kind of authorized modification should be done to a log file? Aren’t log files meant to be logging exactly what happened?

More comments will be done as soon as the official PCI-DSS v.1.2 is released.

The PCI Consortium is currently working on the new PCI DSS Standard, which will be version 1.2. While reviewing the 12 requirements we came out with a surprising point:

Requirement 10.5.2 states that “Audit Trails files should be protected against unauthorized modifications”. We feel that there are is no case for an authorized modification of an audit trail file and hence the word “unauthorized” should be replaced with “all”. Audit trail files should be absolutely immutable to be of any use in a legal or regulatory context.

So, we hope that erasing this “unauthorized” term will happen in the new release. We’ll keep you posted.