Comment by WhitneyLand
4 hours ago
The premise of a secure open codebase is fine.
The problem is being more auditable does not automatically make it more audited.
There have to be enough people with skill taking enough time to work on it.
4 hours ago
The premise of a secure open codebase is fine.
The problem is being more auditable does not automatically make it more audited.
There have to be enough people with skill taking enough time to work on it.
If you think open source is bad, wait till you see enterprise code. I'm talking full auth bypass due to the stupidest crap. You can do that in any language if you have fools working on the code base.
I explicitly make sure services I lead have Integration tests in CI pipeline to validate the "negative paths" against all APIs with missing, invalid, un-authorised identities, expired, un-authenticated tokens. Of course that still doesn't cover every surface, but even that gets sideways glances from some folks who think we should just test happy paths and why we're testing for access controls in Integration tests.
Even security code. Fortinet, a vendor whose entire thing is security for your network, is consistently getting caught out with default passwords, backdoors, etc.
https://community.spiceworks.com/t/hard-coded-password-backd...
This sort of thing leads to every kind of exploit, like
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/half-worlds-fortinet-firewall...
"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt" is a reason why people don't open-source more often.