Open Source Security: Still A Myth

jpkunst writes "John Viega (coauthor of a.o. Building Secure Software) argues in Open Source Securitey: Still A Myth at O'Reilly's onlamp.com that "open source software may currently be less secure than its commercial counterparts.". According to him, there may be "more eyeballs" looking at open source software, but he does not believe those eyeballs are looking for security problems in a structured way."

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John Viega and Mailman

[waldoj]

For those who are or would assail John Viega's credibility, I should remind you who he is.

Most notable for the purpose of this discussion, Viega is the creator of Mailman, the fantastically-popular GPLd mailing list management software. All was good and well with his view of the many-eyeballs theory until, one day, he found a huge, glaring, holy-shit hole in Mailman a few years ago. He was so alarmed that nobody had ever spotted this that, after fixing it, he reflected on what he'd learned and turned it into a thoughtful article, The Myth of Open Source Security. As he wrote:

"For three years, until March 2000, Mailman had a handful of glaring security problems in code that I wrote before I knew much about security. An attacker could use these security holes to gain access to the operating system on Linux computers running the program.

"These were not obscure bugs: anyone armed with the Unix command grep and an iota of security knowledge could have found them in seconds. Even though Mailman was downloaded and installed thousands of times during that time period, no one reported a thing. I finally realized there were problems as I started to learn more about security. Everyone using Mailman, apparently, assumed that someone else had done the proper security auditing, when, in fact, no one had."

Again, Mailman was and is an extremely popular program -- this was not a problem of obscurity.

So, the OnLamp.com article under discussion here is a follow-up to his original article, as he points out in the opening to the new article (but people apparently aren't reading.) As you can imagine, Viega is no rabid anti-OSS guy -- he's, in fact, the very model of what we want our developers to be. He writes good software, admits it when he writes bad software, and tells it like it is, even when we don't want to hear it.

(Disclaimers, such as they are: Viega is an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech, where I attend school, and I was the earliest alpha-tester of Mailman, in the late 90s.)

-Waldo Jaquith