Open-source Security in the Era of Heartbleed

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Presented at CounterMeasure 2014 by

Recent zero-days in popular open-source software have led to a lot of controversy, an old debate fueled by the Heartbleed bug. The old question was: Is open-source software really more secure than closed-source? However, with open-source adoption rates on the rise in the enterprise especially in the Government sector, a new question emerges: How much trust can be put in open-source software and how does open-source software react to the ever-changing threat landscape? In the era of Cyber-espionage and the multitude of security tools, information is available to individuals, blackhats as well as state-sponsored agencies. The old mantra of: ³Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow² does not hold firm anymore and the recent zero-days in OpenSSL are fine examples that we need more than this if we are to depend on open-source for business critical missions. Open-source was created collaboratively, so it only makes sense to secure it collaboratively. This session will go over the most used security models in popular open-source software as well the current emerging models. Finally, this session introduces Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, the first open-source software to reach high assurance security using a crowd-funding approach. We will explore the approach, the process used to assess the security of the software and the process followed for remediation.