The Latest in IT Security

IRS Encourages Poor Cryptography

18
Feb
2015

IRS-logo

I’m not sure what to make of this, or even what it means. The has a standard called IDES: International Data Exchange Service: “The International Data Exchange Service (IDES) is an electronic delivery point where Financial Institutions (FI) and Host Country Tax Authorities (HCTA) can transmit and exchange FATCA data with the United States.” It’s like IRS data submission, but for other governments and foreign banks.

Buried in one of the documents are the rules for encryption:

While performing , there are several settings and options depending on the tool used to perform encryption. IRS recommended settings should be used to maintain :

  • Cipher Mode: ECB (Electronic Code Book).
  • Salt: No salt value
  • Initialization Vector: No Initialization Vector (IV). If an IV is present, set to all zeros to avoid affecting the encryption.
  • Key Size: 256 bits / 32 bytes ­ Key size should be verified and moving the key across operating systems can affect the key size.
  • Encoding: There can be no special encoding. The file will contain only the raw encrypted bytes.
  • Padding: PKCS#7 or PKCS#5.

ECB? Are they serious?

Read More

Leave a reply


Categories

FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2024
WHITE PAPERS

Mission-Critical Broadband – Why Governments Should Partner with Commercial Operators:
Many governments embrace mobile network operator (MNO) networks as ...

ARA at Scale: How to Choose a Solution That Grows With Your Needs:
Application release automation (ARA) tools enable best practices in...

The Multi-Model Database:
Part of the “new normal” where data and cloud applications are ...

Featured

Archives

Latest Comments