Retailers Fighting To No Longer Store Credit Data

Technical Writing Geek writes with the news that the retail industry is getting mighty fed up over credit card company policies requiring them to store payment data. The National Retail Federation (NRF) has gone to bat for store owners, asking the credit industry to change their policies. The frustration stems from payment card industry (PCI) standards and new security measures going into place across the retail experience. Retailers are now trying to point out that many of the elements of the standard would not be a requirement if they didn't have to store so much payment data. "Even if the NRF's demands were immediately met, it would take several years before retailers could purge their systems and applications of credit card data, he said. Over the years, retailers have collected and stored credit card data in myriad systems and places -- including relatively old legacy environments -- and they are just now realizing the data can be a challenge, he said. Purging it can be a bigger headache because the data is often inextricably linked to and used by a variety of customer and marketing applications; simply removing it could cause huge disruptions."

Data Theft

[KGIII]

And if they didn't store the data then we wouldn't have the TJ Maxx crap like stuff going on in the first place. Storing it should be illegal - encrypted or not. There is no reason that numbers need to be stored - even for subscriptions. If worse comes to worse then get the lazy bastards to re-swipe or re-enter the card data.

Well

[morgan_greywolf]

It would seem to me that retailers SHOULD be storing the credit card data because there has to be some type of audit trail available. After all, people need to be able to track down credit card fraud, etc. I'm guessing that the credit card companies store this data as well, though, but they probably only store the amount of the transaction, card number and date, whereas the retailers would have the records of what was purchased, on what date, who rang up the transaction, etc.

All about shifting liability

[gclef]

I would be *very* surprised if the banks voluntarily accepted liability for any part of this chain. They face none now...they'll need a very strong reason to take any risk. The banks like the present system because they face no liability...if the merchant didn't do the right thing, or faces a chargeback, it's all on the merchant. (and it's on the merchant for liability if they're hacked)

Re:Well

[MortimerV]

Why should the credit card data have to be stored by both the retailer and the CC company?

Let the CC company keep a transaction ID and all confidential information, and the retailer keeps the same transaction ID, along with purchase details. That puts the burden of security all in one place, with the CC company, rather than scattered around with all the various retailers.

And if there's a trail to be followed, the CC company and retailer can compare records through the transaction ID.

Re:Data Theft

[heckler95]

I would much rather trust PayPal's servers than every little Mom & Pop business with an e-commerce website that they hired the local high school wiz-kid to create on $4/month shared hosting. N.B. I used to be that wiz-kid.

Several Issues

[wardred]

There are at least two issues with credit card data based on this article. I definitely like the retailer's NOT storing full credit card data. The credit card type, possibly the bank, the card holder's name, the last few digits of the credit card number, and the charge date and time should be more than enough to identify a transaction, especially if there's a transaction id. The credit card companies HAVE to have full account data, but the more systems this data is stored in, the less secure it is, no matter what security is implemented at each individual site. If you can remove the bank and CC number entirely and work strictly off of transaction ID and card type, I'd be even happier. Storing this minimum of data would allow everybody to identify a particular charge if there's a dispute about charges, would still allow retailers to generate whatever statistical data they need, and would prevent identity thieves from getting full CC numbers, expiration dates, etc. from retailers.

On the other hand, retailers still need to secure whatever legacy data they have, and work on purging the systems that store it. These are two different problems, and both sides of this debate seem to want to point out the problems with their opponent's positions without addressing their own issues. If retailers have the data and aren't securing it, then I have little sympathy for them when they get heavily fined for not treating our sensitive data properly, even if the CC companies require the storage of some of that data and shouldn't. Especially for major retailers where the IT budget can be spread across many, many stores.

So, short term solution is to get the retail stores to abide by the current security regulations posted by CC companies. The longer term solution is to get a more sane set of security solutions from the CC companies, and make it so that every retail outlet is required NOT to store sensitive data that crackers might want to get a hold of. This would reduce the number of outlets to our sensitive data to a minimum. It would reduce it to the companies that have to retain that data anyway.

Cash is so easy.

[miracle69]

"This note is legal tender for all debts public and private."

Very simple compared to the 15 page credit card contract for the consumer and the headaches for the retailer.

Henry David Thoreau said it best, "Simplify".

Re:The joys of insecurity

[SoCalEd]

Its not that easy and its not just at the store itself. I work for a large national retailer and sit on the committee that is overseeing implementation of the CISP and now PCI requirements. Anti-intrusion systems and other general network security issues aside, there are, unfortunately, a lot of touchpoints that make this hard, time consuming and costly.

  - Not all point of sale systems (especially older ones) are set up to only show last four = code modification. If the vendor still supports it.
  - Hard copy of receipts to reverse chargebacks need to be reprogrammed to only show last four.
  - Hard copy of detail tape and settlement journals likewise.
  - Modify register and pole display programming to obscure card number as well
  - Got old credit card terminals? Oh, bummer. You get to replace them all at a few hundred bucks a pop if they can't be upgraded to Triple DES. Retail math primer: 100 stores * 10 terminals * $300 = $300k plus time and effort to reinject merchant numbers, test, roll-out, etc. Oh. And how long will that standard last?
  - Credit card terminals go down? Rules require taking a manual imprint of the card. Now those copies need to be stored and secured.

And at corporate? Same issues.

  - Delete it from the marketing databases. Delete it from loss prevention programs.
  - Password protect each individual spreadsheet used for reconciling payments and thats still not secure.
  - Also have to make sure nobody can email or otherwise copy the files and take them out with them.
  - When glitches happen and duplicate charges happen, somebody at corporate needs the full number to issue the credit.
  - Years of back-up tapes contain the data too - on-site and off-site.

The biggest problem, and its difficult (and costly) to even insure against, is the virtually unlimited amount of damages which can pile up - even on a retailer trying to do it right. The NRF, of which we are a member, has it right. There is no need for us to store card numbers at all. If the processor and banks have the full number (which they do), then a chargeback request for a signed receipt based upon location, date/time, amount and last four is all that is necessary. I'm not carping about the cost of protecting sensitive data. I'm carping about the cost of being forced by Visa/Mastercard regs to store *unnecessary* sensitive data then having to jump through ever-changing hoops to do so.

TJ Maxx is another issue. They clearly dropped the ball by allowing their kiosks onto their store networks unfirewalled, but anyone who minimizes the cost/effort behind this issue is sorely misinformed.

Oh yeah. Guess who ends up paying these costs?

Re:Data Theft

[maxume]

So the traffic you were sniffing was SSL encrypted?

Re:why not encrypt?

[Thundersnatch]

You're missing the point. The encryption doesn't prevent anything in 90% of applications, because the key mangement is terrible. You might was well just use base64 encoding and save the CPU cycles. Just using an AES-256 library function doesn't make the data secure.

Most applications I've seen - quite a few, both in-house and off-the-shelf - use a fixed symmetric key for credit card encryption, stored right in the application code or in a configuration file. Often this key is on the same server as the database, and even if it is not, the app server probably has the same vulnerabilies and probably the same passwords that gave you access to the database. They also typically don't use a unique initialization vector for each database row, so a dictionary attack against the encrypted card data is often dead simple (often the cipher and mode of operation are chosen poorly as well, and there's only about 30 bits of entropy in a credit card number).

Doing encryption key management correctly is not easy. To do it right, you'd need to use public key encryption, or a Kerberos-like system where an entered password can temporarily unlock a copy of the shared encryption key. Better yet, use hardware key escrow. And don't forget the need to revoke keys, and change them often.

It's much easier and safer to just to throw away the card numbers and CVC as soon as you get the auth code from Visa. Right now we keep card data only for as long as it takes the transaction to settle. But it would be best if card data was only ever stored in RAM (and yeah, I know the swapfile is a vulnerability, too).