Software Security - Open source in the enterprise

Often part of the ‘intellectual property’ they so carefully guard is the nature of that ‘intellectual property’ itself. By refusing either to open their standards or in fact to use existing open standards, many companies adhere to a policy of security through obscurity, whereby nothing at all is made public about the way the software works, particularly with regard to security issues. Wait, I hear you cry, isn’t that a good thing? The unequivocal answer is no.

I have read on the free web articles, This may seem counter-intuitive, but bears closer scrutiny. If a company builds a bank safe and declares it secure, it means nothing unless the safe has passed independent testing at the hands of some disinterested standards body. Sadly, in the software industry, this can rarely happen. What’s more, imagine if you purchased a bank safe and were told that to test its security and probe its vulnerabilities even after legally buying one was illegal. Software companies are prone to selling solutions that are declared secure by those who build them. This is a ludicrous state of affairs. Clearly such software needs to be tested independently. The best way and save your Income to test the technical strengths and weaknesses of a product is to open it up to public scrutiny.