Boosting faith in the authenticity of open source software
Brief
Open source software — software that is freely distributed, along with its source code, so that copies, additions, or modifications can be readily made — is “everywhere,” to quote the 2023 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis Report. Ninety-six percent of the computer programs used by major industries include open source software, and 76 percent of those programs consist of open source software.
But the percentage of software packages “containing security vulnerabilities remains troublingly high,” the report warned.
One concern is that “the software you’ve gotten from what you believe to be a reliable developer has somehow been compromised,” says Kelsey Merrill ’22, MEng ’23, a software engineer who received a master’s degree earlier this year from MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.