You can almost bet the that the users of the Tax program use IE to surf the internet, and mostly unpatched. The dangerous web site, knowing the default location of the Tax files, or even the unprotected "net use IP C:" doesn't help out our users.
What could help our users is a default simple encryption of the Tax files.
You are correct when saying
"I am wondering, is it really the responsibility of every piece of software that handles potentially sensitive info to provide (strong)encryption capabilities?"
Because not everyone using today's computers can utilized EFS or a third party encryption tool.
.er.587
-----Original Message----- From: auto40951@hushmail.com [mailto:auto40951@hushmail.com] Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2003 1:27 PM To: bugtraq@securityfocus.com Subject: response to tax software not encrypting tax info
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PivX:
I am wondering, is it really the responsibility of every piece of software that handles potentially sensitive info to provide (strong)encryption capabilities?
I think the onus of protecting sensitive info should fall on the user in many cases. This obviously includes not sharing your tax info on KaZaA or on network shares and using reliable third-party encryption software to protect anything that you really don't want other people to know about. NTFS permissions and EFS can also be used to this effect. In the end, these measures will also be way way way more effective than relying on some hacked together info encoding algorithm that merely obsfucates your tax info and introduces the additional security "vulnerability" of weakly encoding the information.
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