Coverity Reports Open Source Security Making Great Strides

Coverity is claiming they have found and helped to fix more than 7,500 security flaws in open source software since the inception of the governmentally backed project designed to harden open source software. The company has also identified eleven projects that have been especially responsive in correcting security problems. "Eleven projects have been awarded the newly announced status of Rung 2, including those known as Amanda, NTP, OpenPAM, OpenVPN, Overdose, Perl, PHP, Postfix, Python, Samba, and TCL."

Now if only Coverity would release some code..

[Deanalator]

A huge pet peeve of mine is when university professors use academic journals to advertise for their company. I have read many papers from Dawson Engler's group, and they all seem to have the same outline. Vague outlines of the new analysis algorithms they use, heavy with statistics on how badly they broke various open source projects, and always a Coverity plug. The lack of repeatable results should be enough to reject them from any self respecting computer science journal, but they keep publishing.

If DHS spent its money on investing in high quality static analysis plugins for modern (free) development environments, then you would catch all of the old mistakes, and make sure that they did not happen in the future. I just get annoyed when I see how much money goes to these companies whose only concern is treating the symptoms, not the cause, of poor security standards in software development.