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Nevada Businesses Must Start Encrypting E-Mail By Oct. 1st
dtothes writes "Baseline is reporting the state of Nevada has a statute about to go in effect on October 1, 2008 that will force businesses to encrypt all personally identifiable information transmitted over the Internet. They speak with a Nevada legal expert who says the problem is that the statute is written so broadly that the law could potentially open up a ton of unintentional liability and allow for the interpretation of things like password-protected documents to be considered sufficiently encrypted. Quoting: 'Beyond the infrastructure impact, the statute itself looks like Swiss cheese. Bryce K. Earl, a Las Vegas-based attorney, ... has been following the issue closely and believes there are some problems with the statute as it is on the books right now, namely the broad definition of encryption, the lack of coordination with industry standards and the unclear nature of penalties both criminal and civil.'"
So businesses merely need to refrain from putting social security numbers, drivers license numbers, and passwords in email and other insecure communication channels and they're good. They can even send the password, provided they don't send the account number along with it. This makes forgotten password recovery a bit harder, but it's not impossible to comply with.
Yes and no. The law says that you have to encrypt when you send personal data. The definition of encryption is pretty broad but the definition of personal data is very narrow so you could have a web site which is unencrypted except for the part where the customers identified themselves.
Overall, I don't see the problem with this. That they allow weak encryption is a red herring. Strong encryption will also comply with the ruling and so most people will use that. Weak encryption is often better than nothing. There are loopholes, but those can be closed later. This looks like a good start.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
RTFL. There is "personal information"
NRS 603A.040 "Personal information" defined. "Personal information" means a natural person's first name or first initial and last name in combination with any one or more of the following data elements, when the name and data elements are not encrypted:
1. Social security number.
2. Driver's license number or identification card number.
3. Account number, credit card number or debit card number, in combination with any required security code, access code or password that would permit access to the person's financial account.
Ê The term does not include the last four digits of a social security number or publicly available information that is lawfully made available to the general public.
(Added to NRS by 2005, 2504; A 2005, 22nd Special Session, 109; 2007, 1314)
So based on this legislation, resetting a users password and sending them the new password via email is illegal?
This is an extremely insecure procedure, unless you make sure that, upon receiving the e-mail, the user will quickly log-in and change the pass to another one (the mailed password only used as a temporary pass). Or if the mail actually is a special reset-URL which could let the user choose his own.
An email is just as secure as a postcard. Everyone (for example the postman could read it). Same for the e-mail : it transits un-encrypted and could be intercepted at any point on the way to the receiver.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
...isn't primarily with the law, it's with the Nevada definition of "encryption". Writing definitions of such things for legislation is a more difficult problem than you might think. (I helped draft Virginia's definition of encryption, and what we ended up with ain't perfect.) But in this case, Nevada's definition just plain sucks.
One of the challenges of writing legislation is that you really can't refer to specific technologies, otherwise you end up having to update the law every time the technology is broken.
Also, if you rely on a punch list of approved technologies, you effectively block out alternatives. ("But your honor, I used Blowfish because it's more secure than Triple-DES." "Sorry, son, Blowfish isn't on the list I see here. Guilty!")
Unfortunately, this is a case of "Not a Bad Idea, Piss-poor Implementation". There's a lot for Nevada to fix here.
For the humor-impaired, performing ROT-13 twice results in the same text as the original unencrypted message. Performing ROT-13 twice again to "decrypt" would once again result in the same text as the original, unencrypted message. It's just a joke, relax.
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