OSS-Fuzz: Five months later, and rewarding projects
From the post:
Five months ago, we announced OSS-Fuzz, Google’s effort to help make open source software more secure and stable. Since then, our robot army has been working hard at fuzzing, processing 10 trillion test inputs a day. Thanks to the efforts of the open source community who have integrated a total of 47 projects, we’ve found over 1,000 bugs (264 of which are potential security vulnerabilities).
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Notable results
OSS-Fuzz has found numerous security vulnerabilities in several critical open source projects: 10 in FreeType2, 17 in FFmpeg, 33 in LibreOffice, 8 in SQLite 3, 10 in GnuTLS, 25 in PCRE2, 9 in gRPC, and 7 in Wireshark, etc. We’ve also had at least one bug collision with another independent security researcher (CVE-2017-2801). (Some of the bugs are still view restricted so links may show smaller numbers.)
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A useful way to improve the quality of software and its security. Not only that, but rewards are offered for projects that adopt the ideal integration guidelines.
The Patch Rewards program now includes rewards for integration of fuzz targets into OSS-Fuzz.
Contributing to open source projects, here by contributing to the use of fuzzing in the development process, is a far cry from the labor market damaging “Hack the Air Force” program. The US Air Force can and does spend $millions if not $billions on insecure software and services.
Realizing it has endangered itself, but unwilling to either contract for better services and/or to hold its present contractors responsible for shabby work, the Air Force is attempting to damage the labor market for defensive cybersecurity services by soliciting free work. Or nearly so given the ratio of the prizes to Air Force spending on software.
$Millions in contributions to open source projects, not a single dime for poorly managed government IT contract results.