Intel Opens CDSA Source

Quite a number of people have written over the last couple of days about Intel's decision to open-source CDSA, their security software, when it's released on May 15. That's their Common Data Security Architecture -- it's an enterprise-level security application.

Comments

Good to see

[XenoWolf]

This just goes to prove that the software they are releasing uses good, strong algorithms that don't rely on hiding the source for their effectiveness.

But open source is cool.

[(void*)]

Well why not? Why isn't it cool for companies to open-source their products? From my point of view, it's excellent! As long as they know that it doesn't make them cool forever.

The only issue seems to be whether they can keep maintaining it open-sourced, if it is really opensourced in the first place. Now that would make them continually cool. And that is the hard thing for commercial interests to do.

Was this more of an ad for Itanium?

[ltcordelia]

First: kudoes to Intel for helping to accelerate the growth of the security industry.

However, *thwack* to ZDNet for an article that says almost nothing about CDSA, and instead focuses on marketing Itanium, Trillian, and Whistler (Windoze '01, if you didn't catch that). Note: it appears from the style of linking that this was actually three different articles that were tied together because they were related

Information wants to be free

Of course, you may not want it...

[davecb]

Just because it's free, don't assume you'd actually want it.

Firstly, it's heavyweight, secondly it's an interface to a cloud of other interfaces, any one of which may be sufficient, and thirdly it drags along the assumptions of the authors about "what's good for the 'net".

As Laurence Lessig points out in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, a perfect authentication and identification system may be something you don't want.

--dave

Sprinkling of the fairy dust...

[PolyWog]

Once again, you see that companies start to spread the fairy dust of open source and immediately think that they are cool.

Many companies think that just because they are open sourcing some stuff, they'll instantly become cool. Now what (i must say) i find interesting is that this is a hardware manufacturer.

Now, only if windows were GPL'd, i might actually buy a copy ;)

Obvious question is how open ?

[scrutty]

Well , following on from my subject line the first question that strikes me is how "open source" this "open source" release is going to be , in these days of this being a much-maligned label. Are we going to be seeing yet another open-source licence, or will Intel have the sense to use a pre-existing one.

I must confess to knowing vey little about this product , but I am also led to speculate if this is going to lead to any interesting crypto algorithims leaking their way out into open-source space. Security products often mean cryptography and as we all know, cryptography often means patents, so there could be some interesting issues there.

The thing that really confused me was the references in the article to this software being Itanium optimized. Fair enough then, Intel's motives could be seen as carrot dangling to persuade consumers to migrate more enthusiastically to a nascent technology platform. Then I was left wondering exactly how source code would be Itanium optimized. Surely it could be optimally tweaked and recompiled for any platform, even non-intel architectures.

Unless of course I'm missing the point as to what the product does and there is a hardware component of some kind.

Either that or its largely an assember source code release which people could already have disassembeled for themselves. But that would be ridiculous, so I'm still left pondering. Have to wait and see I guess. Anyone got any more information, or links

Re:Could someone explain CDSA in more detail?

[stx23]

The article linked to didn't really do much to explain CDSA... I'm curious. What does it do?

Better details from the horses mouth.