A1.1.4 Penetration testing of tenant separation every six months

The provider must confirm with a penetration test, at least once every six months, that the logical separation controls isolating customer environments are effective. Applicability: this separation testing is additional to the penetration tests required by Requirement 11.4.6. Guidance: a good practice is to build temporary mock-up customer environments and try to reach one from another and from the Internet. Objective under the customized approach: the isolation between each customer environment and every other environment is periodically shown to work. Future-dated: treated as a best practice up to 31 March 2025 and mandatory since then.

Source: PCI DSS v4.0.1, A1.1.4. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open PCI DSS v4.0.1 in the compliance library.

Version 4.0.1 is the active version; 4.0 has been retired. Appendix A1 applies only to multi-tenant service providers, A2 only to card-present POS POI terminals that still use SSL or early TLS, and A3 only when a payment brand or acquirer requires it. Which requirements apply to you follows your validation type.