The White House leans in on the open-source issue

White House, Washington DC. © iStock.

After last December’s serious Log4Shell vulnerability revealed a marked fragility in the open-source model, the White House has decided to look into the problem. It met on Thursday with the leaders of major technology companies, including Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta (Facebook), IBM and Microsoft, to discuss the security of open-source software. The summit also convened the Apache Software Foundation, owner and maintainer of the Log4j library, and Oracle, owner of the Java software platform on which the Log4j library runs. GitHub and the Linux Open Source Foundation were also represented. Following the discovery of the Log4j vulnerability, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan described the security of open-source software as a “key national security concern”. Open-source software vulnerabilities have given rise to some of the most serious security flaws in recent history, such as the Heartbleed bug, discovered in 2014, which affected the OpenSSL encryption library. Despite their widespread use, essential libraries are largely maintained by an insufficient number of unpaid volunteers.

⇨ The Verge, Corin Faife, “White House hosts tech summit to discuss open-source security after Log4j.”

2022-01-13