Security News

Open source is at least as important to the economy, public services, and national security as proprietary code, but it lacks the same standards and safeguards. Given open source's value as a public asset, an institutional structure must be built that sustains and secures it.

Detectree, developed by WithSecure, is a detection visualization tool for cyber security defense teams. "Time is always working against incident responders. And looking through rows of text data and making connections between them and the suspicious activity under investigation is time spent not remediating the problem, which is a real waste when you're under pressure to stop an attack."

Alibaba's financial services affiliate, Ant Group, has open sourced its "Privacy-preserving Computation Framework." A "Secure Processing Unit" that offers a "Provable, measurable secure computation device, which provides computation ability while keeping your private data protected".

The Python module "Ctx" and a fork of the PHP library "Phpass" have recently been modified by an unknown attacker to grab AWS credentials/keys and send them to a Heroku app. What at first seemed like the work of a malicious actor turned out to be an exploit by a security researcher, who wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to take control of popular packages and the repositories hosting them.

Google has a plan - and a new product plus a partnership with developer-focused security shop Snyk - that attempts to make it easier for enterprises to secure their open source software dependencies. They have corresponding enriched metadata incorporating Container/Artifact Analysis data and are built with Cloud Build, which verifies the code complies with SLSA - this is Google's framework for ensuring the integrity of software artifacts throughout the software supply chain.

Google on Thursday announced the creation of a new "Open Source Maintenance Crew" to focus on bolstering the security of critical open source projects. The tech giant pointed out Open Source Insights as a tool for analyzing packages and their dependency graphs, using it to determine "Whether a vulnerability in a dependency might affect your code."

The Linux Foundation and the Open Source Software Security Foundation, with input provided by executives from 37 companies and many U.S. government leaders, delivered a 10-point plan to broadly address open source and software supply chain security, by securing open source security production, improving vulnerability discovery and remediation, and shortening the patching response time of the ecosystem. Incident Response - Establish the OpenSSF Open Source Security Incident Response Team, security experts who can step in to assist open source projects during critical times when responding to a vulnerability.

Built and supported by vast communities of developers, OSS has become the ubiquitous building block of devices and apps in the general information technology community where 92% of applications now contain open source software - and medical devices have been catching up with that trend over the past few years. One open source library could be pulling in any number of dependencies: other open source libraries in a potentially long chain that also need to be examined.

The Open Source Security Foundation has announced the initial prototype release of a new tool that's capable of carrying out dynamic analysis of all packages uploaded to popular open source repositories. Called the Package Analysis project, the initiative aims to secure open-source packages by detecting and alerting users to any malicious behavior with the goal of bolstering the security of the software supply chain and increasing trust in open-source software.

The Open Source Security Foundation, a Linux Foundation-backed initiative has released its first prototype version of the 'Package Analysis' tool that aims to catch and counter malicious attacks on open source registries. In a pilot run that lasted less than a month, the open source project released on GitHub, was able to identify over 200 malicious npm and PyPI packages.