How Secure Is StarOffice?

supabeast! asks: "I am currently working for a large financial corporation that still uses MS Office 97. At some point the company will need to upgrade to a newer office suite, and I think that with some work I may be able to push the company towards StarOffice, which I prefer over MS Office. I am slowly putting together a list of advantages (and disadvantages) of StarOffice over MS Office 2000, and one glaring problem in MS Office is the many security flaws that it has brought up. Does anyone know of security issues with StarOffice, on any platform?" With MS Office still smarting from the LOVE from viruses like Melissa, I think it's high time we looked for alternatives. Security should be one of the first things that should be evaluated.

Comments

We don't know

[PD]

I don't think anybody really knows what security issues exist with Star Office. It's a huge program, all of it closed source. It has a scripting language which may or may not be conducive for virus propagation. It crashes regularly, so it's very possible that it has some buffer overflow bugs lurking in the code. It's multi-platform, so if a Windows version of a Star Office script virus were released, it could possibly also damage Linux machines.

We're lucky so far in that almost nobody runs Star Office, so the environment for viruses is very poor. Just like a virus in the meat world, computer viruses require a certain density of their hosts before they can replicate quickly. Star Office doesn't really provide that density, and it may never provide that density.

These sorts of closed-source kitchen sink apps that are appearing for Linux are useful tools, no doubt. But they are also very dangerous. I hope that open source apps become dominant in the desktop categories, because peer reviewed security is far better than the completely unreviewed security of Star Office.

Anyone that claims that Star Office is secure should be immediately challenged to "Prove It". Without the source code, security cannot be proved.