Open-source software enables code review and reuse, but known vulnerabilities and unmaintained dependencies can create cybersecurity risks.
Search across headline titles and summaries.
Background for this topic.
Open source is software whose source code is available under a license that permits use, inspection, modification, and redistribution. It may be developed by a community, an organization, or a small group of maintainers; “open” does not guarantee that the code is actively reviewed, supported, or secure.
For security teams, the main concerns are vulnerabilities in dependencies and the software supply chain: a maintainer account, release process, or package can be compromised, while an unmaintained component may retain known flaws. Public code can enable review and faster fixes, but visibility alone is not a control. Maintain an inventory or SBOM of open-source components, pin and verify versions or signatures where possible, monitor vulnerability advisories, and apply updates through a controlled process.
The Open-Source Software Prevalence Initiative, announced at DEF CON, will examine how open source software is used in critical infrastructure.
Teams designed AI systems to secure open-source infrastructure software to be used in industry sectors such as financial services, utilities, and healthcare. Each finalist was awarded a $2 million prize.
Multiple high-profile open-source projects, including those from Google, Microsoft, AWS, and Red Hat, were found to leak GitHub authentication tokens through GitHub Actions artifacts in CI/CD workflows. [...]
Cloud services and thus millions of end users who access them could have been affected by the poisoning of artifacts in the development workflow of open source projects.
DARPA awards $14 million to seven teams competing to develop AI systems capable of identifying and patching vulnerabilities in open-source software