WRITTEN ON December 4th, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, What do we want?
Decades after government’s deeply ill-advised IT security authority CESG fought tooth and nail to prevent the spread of simple encryption such as PGP, we find HMRC feels it would be impractical to have valuable details encrypted, says MSN
Investors’ details stay in the post
Confidential information on millions of investors is regularly being sent
through the post to HM Revenue and Customs without proper security.Investment managers in the City are required to mail personal data on their
clients to HMRC on unencrypted computer disks in spite of the recent outcry
over the disappearance of two disks containing information on 25 million child
benefit claimants.HMRC said encrypting the data would be a “recipe for chaos”, as it would not be
practical to decrypt information from thousands of different financial
institutions using different coding programs….A spokeswoman for HMRC said it would be impractical to ask investment managers
to encrypt the data before they sent it. “It’s not a question of cost, but
practicality. You can’t have one side having one encoding system and one having
another – it’s a recipe for chaos.”
Ooooh. Chaos. That scary thing government can’t cope with. AKA day-to-day reality.
Reality check: The way government treats our data is so bad that a Microsoft news service, offshoot of the bullying juvenile delinquent of the IT industry, stands out as the voice of reason.
3 Responses to “HMRC can’t be arsed to deal with encrypted data”
Brian Gladman writes to say
The HMRC is wrong to suggest that it could not handle the encryption of this data since PGP or GPG (the public domain version of PGP) could do this easily if they put their mind to it. More than this – a dedicated solution based on the HMRC issuing certificates to those it shares this data with would have been quite easy to implement and not that expensive from an HMRC viewpoint (probably less than £1m)
CESG has constantly fought to keep public sector bodies either (a) away from crypto use all together, or (b) use of UK government solutions that are both expensive and cumbersome. They wanted secret government algorithms to be used at a time when their US counterpart NSA was delivering AES as a strong public algoirithm for widespread use in Federal and State Agencies.
An amusing side issue here is that of HMRC and ZIP since it seems that the data was compressed and password protected with ZIP. They have been widely criticised for using ZIP since most people think that ZIP password protection is rubbish, as it was before version 9! But from version 9.0 onwards a new format was introduced that uses AES. And if they used this format with a reasonable password (e.g. 10
characters) the data on the discs would be very safe because the protection is ‘state of the art’. How do I know? I did the design (see http://www.winzip.com/aes_tips.htm)! And it has been reviewed by other experts and no major security flaws have been discovered. So all HMRC had to do was to use a modern version of ZIP _properly_ and they would have had a rock solid defence for the lost discs.Of course, encryption would not have excused the lax controls on access with HMRC but it would have given some defence. But I would find it ironic if after all of this it turns out that the discs were effectively protected and I had to speak up in HMRC’s defence!
the CESG has constantly fought to keep public sector bodies either (a) away from crypto use all together, or (b) use of UK government solutions that are both expensive and cumbersome. They wanted secret government algorithms to be used at a time when their US counterpart NSA was delivering AES as a strong public algoirithm for widespread use in Federal and State Agencies.
Easy there, laddie. I think you’ll find that it’s the Press Association standing out as a voice of reason here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-7119897,00.html
Better now? (-: