On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 10:19 PM, Noel Jones <njo...@megan.vbhcs.org> wrote:
> On 9/2/2011 2:17 PM, Michael B Allen wrote:
>> My objectives are not driven by or based on logic. They are based on
>> the requirements of a consortium of credit card companies and banks.
>
> Do they require you to offer STARTTLS on port 25?

My understanding is that PCI compliance requires only that the machine
processing cardholder data pass a vulnerability scan with no CVE
vulnerabilities of level 4 or higher. So the presence of SSLv2 in
general is considered a vulnerability. PCI says nothing of what can be
running on a machine or what ports they use. You can dispute something
with a scan by supplying an explanation as to why you believe the
particular CVE is not applicable but I have since stopped working on
the vulnerability scan because I have learned that this particular
vulnerability scanning vendor clears all disputes every 90 days.
Meaning I would have to re-enter them every 90 days and the UI for
doing that is a Flash application so I cannot just re-submit something
like a spreadsheet. Because I am using CentOS which backports many
security updates, this would be an enormous amount of work. My extra
sensory perception tells me that the whole process is actually
designed to make it excessively difficult to become PCI compliant. If
you are not PCI compliant, you can process cardholder data (as I have
been for several years) but you have greater liability if that data is
stolen thus leaving the credit card companies and banks with less
liability.

Mike

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