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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.'"
. . . which Nevada legislator's friend or relative just happens to sell some kind of compliant encryption solution.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
If they are not clear on the definition of encryption, just ROT-13 your messages twice and specify that's the type of encryption you use. You then have to ROT-13 it twice again to decrypt.
... the encryption of my customer records at Nevada's brothels.
I just hope they do more than password protecting the word docs...
I have developed a system by which each character is taken and broken up into a pattern of ones and zeros. The exact pattern is determined by looking up the character in a table. The receiver has to unscramble this pattern of ones and zeros by looking the pattern up in a similar table and then regenerating the character.
I call this system ASCII and I believe that it is a simple type of encryption, albeit with a very public public key, and no private key.
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.
I use ROT26. It must be twice as secure at ROT13.
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();
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.