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A Secure String Class Compliant with PCI DSS

Published: 14 November 2019 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    Computer programs often work with a variety of sensitive data and class String is widely used in object-oriented programming languages for this purpose. However, saving sensitive data to a String object is not safe as it is not encrypted and may still be in the operating memory even after it is no longer needed. Due to non-deterministic behaviour of mechanism responsible for removing unused items from the memory, we cannot say with certainty when String with sensitive data will actually be removed. If an attacker gets either part of or even the entire memory image, then they can easily read these sensitive data. This paper discusses the options in object oriented languages that provide programmers with a way of storing the data in memory in an encrypted form. We present a pseudo code for a secure String class that is compliant with Data retention and Cryptography requirements of the PCI DSS standard.

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    1. A Secure String Class Compliant with PCI DSS

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      CECC 2019: Proceedings of the Third Central European Cybersecurity Conference
      November 2019
      134 pages
      ISBN:9781450372961
      DOI:10.1145/3360664
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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      • University of Maribor

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 14 November 2019

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      Author Tags

      1. data protection in memory
      2. secure String
      3. sensitive data

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      • Research-article
      • Research
      • Refereed limited

      Funding Sources

      • Agentúra na Podporu Vðskumu a Vðvoja
      • Faculty of Science, Pavol Jozef Safarik University

      Conference

      CECC 2019
      CECC 2019: Central European Cybersecurity Conference
      November 14 - 15, 2019
      Munich, Germany

      Acceptance Rates

      CECC 2019 Paper Acceptance Rate 19 of 35 submissions, 54%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 38 of 65 submissions, 58%

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