Mexico's Data Protection Law (Ley Federal de Protección de Datos Personales en Posesión de los Particulares) Compliance

Regulation Summary

Mexico's Data Protection Law (Ley Federal de Protección de Datos Personales en Posesión de los Particulares) became effective July 6, 2010.

Intent

An article in El Economista on 26 January 2017 notes “the objective of the General Law for the Protection of Personal Data is to establish the foundational principles and procedures to guarantee the right of all people to protect their personal information in possession of other subjects.”

Areli Cano Guadiana, Commissioner for the Institute on Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data stated in El Financiero, “the approval of the General Law for the Protection of Personal Data by Mexico’s Legislature represents a significant advancement for the right of people to control the handling of their personal information.”

Details

Data privacy and security expert Francoise Gilbert writes:

The Law applies to personal data that are processed, transferred, or disposed by private persons or entities. “Personal data” includes any information pertaining to an identified or identifiable natural person.

....

Data controllers must have in place appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safeguards in order to ensure that personal data are protected from loss, damage, alteration, destruction, and unauthorized access or use.

Penalties

According to the resolution enacted by the Honorary Representative Council of the National Commission on Minimum Salaries, infractions and sanctions dictated by Chapter X of the General Law for the Protection of Personal Data are set between 100 and 320,000 days of minimum salary within the Federal District, which can amount to 6,500 to 20,700,000 Mexican pesos.

Compliance Summary

Complying with Mexico’s Data Protection Law (Ley Federal de Protección de Datos Personales en Posesión de los Particulare) and avoiding fines and breach notifications requires best-practice data security that is state-of-the-art.

Thales’s essential offerings in this area include:

• Access control to ensure only credentialed users can retrieve the data
• Data-centric protection that ensures that if data is stolen, it is meaningless and therefore useless to cybercriminals
• Security intelligence logs to identify irregular access patterns and breaches in progress

Access Control

Vormetric’s Data Security Platform provides state of the art user access control.

• Separation of privileged access users and sensitive user data. With the Vormetric Data Security Platform, administrators can create a strong separation of duties between privileged administrators and data owners. The Vormetric Transparent Encryption encrypts files, while leaving their metadata in the clear. In this way, IT administrators—including hypervisor, cloud, storage, and server administrators—can perform their system administration tasks, without being able to gain privileged access to the sensitive data residing on the systems they manage.
• Separation of administrative duties. Strong separation-of-duties policies can be enforced to ensure one administrator does not have complete control over data security activities, encryption keys, or administration. In addition, the Vormetric Data Security Manager supports two-factor authentication for administrative access.
• Granular privileged access controls. Vormetric’s solution can enforce very granular, least-privileged-user access management policies, enabling protection of data from misuse by privileged users and APT attacks. Granular privileged-user-access management policies can be applied by user, process, file type, time of day, and other parameters. Enforcement options can control not only permission to access clear-text data, but what file-system commands are available to a user.

Data-Centric Protection

Vormetric protects the data itself through Vormetric Transparent Encryption with integrated Key Management for data at rest, Application Encryption, Tokenization with Dynamic Masking and more. These techniques make the data meaningless and worthless without the tools to decrypt it.

Security Intelligence Logs

Thales lets the enterprise to monitor and identify extraordinary data access. Vormetric Security Intelligence Logs are detailed management logs that specify which processes and users have accessed protected data. They specify when users and processes accessed data, under which policies, and if access requests were allowed or denied. The management logs will even expose when a privileged user submits a command like 'switch users' in order to attempt to imitate, and potentially exploit, the credentials of another user. Sharing these logs with a security information and event management (SIEM) platform helps uncover anomalous patterns in processes and user access, which can prompt further investigation. For example, an administrator or process may suddenly access much larger volumes of data than normal, or attempt to do an unauthorized download of files. These events could point to an APT attack or malicious insider activities.

Hardware Security Modules (HSMs)

HSMs from Thales provide a hardened, tamper-resistant environment for secure cryptographic processing, key generation and protection, encryption and more. Available in three FIPS 140-2 certified form factors, HSMs support a variety of deployment scenarios. Connect and Solo HSMs also provide a secure environment for running sensitive applications. The CodeSafe option lets you execute code within boundaries, protecting your applications and the data they process.

In addition HSMs:

• Generate and protect root and certificate authority (CA) keys, providing support for PKIs across a variety of use cases
• Sign your application code so you can ensure that your software remains secure, unaltered and authentic
• Create digital certificates for credentialing and authenticating proprietary electronic devices for IoT applications and other network deployments.