Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

August 29, 2016

Open Source Software & The Department of Defense

Filed under: Government,Military,Open Source — Patrick Durusau @ 1:21 pm

Open Source Software & The Department of Defense by Ben FitzGerald, Peter L. Levin, and Jacqueline Parziale.

A great resource for sharing with Department of Defense (DoD) staff who may be in positions to influence software development, acquisition policies.

In particular you may want to point to the “myths” about security and open source software:

Discussion of open source software in national security is often dismissed out of hand because of technical security
concerns. These are unfounded.

To debunk a few myths:

  • Using open source licensing does not mean that changes to the source code must be shared publicly.
  • The ability to see source code is not the same as the ability to modify deployed software in production.
  • Using open source components is not equivalent to creating an entire system that is itself open sourced.

As In-Q-Tel’s Chief Information Security Officer Dan Geer explains, security is “the absence of unmitigatable surprise.”23 It is particularly difficult to mitigate surprise with closed proprietary software, because the source code, and therefore the ability to identify and address its vulnerabilities, is hidden. “Security through obscurity” is not an effective defense against today’s cybersecurity threats.

In this context, open source software can generate better security outcomes than proprietary alternatives. Conventional anti-malware scanning and intrusion detection are inadequate for many reasons, including their “focus on known vulnerabilities” that miss unknown threats, such as zero-day exploits. As an example, a DARPA-funded team built a flight controller for small quadcopter drones based on an open source autopilot readily downloaded from the Internet. A red team “found no security flaws in six weeks with full access [to the] source code,” making their UAV the most secure on the planet.24

Except that “security” to a DoD contractor has little to do with software security.

No, for a DoD contractor, “security” means change orders, which trigger additional software development cycles, which are largely unauditable, software testing, changes to documentation, all of which could be negatively impacted by “…an open source autopilot.”

If open source is used, there are fewer billing opportunities and that threatens the “security” of DoD contractors.

The paper makes a great case for why the DoD should make greater use of open source software and development practices, but the DoD will have to break the strangle hold of a number of current DoD contractors to do so.

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