Do you actually audit open source projects you download?
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The question is simple. I wanted to get a general consensus on if people actually audit the code that they use from FOSS or open source software or apps.
Do you blindly trust the FOSS community? I am trying to get a rough idea here. Sometimes audit the code? Only on mission critical apps? Not at all?
Let's hear it!
depends like for known projecte like curl i wont because i know its fine but if its a new project i heard about i do audit the source and if i dont know the lang its in i ask someone that does
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Could you let me know what sort of models you're using? Everything I've tried has basically been so bad it was quicker and more reliable to to the job myself. Most of the models can barely write boilerplate code accurately and securely, let alone anything even moderately complex.
I've tried to get them to analyse code too, and that's hit and miss at best, even with small programs. I'd have no faith at all that they could handle anything larger; the answers they give would be confident and wrong, which is easy to spot with something small, but much harder to catch with a large, multi process system spread over a network. It's hard enough for humans, who have actual context, understanding and domain knowledge, to do it well, and I've, personally, not seen any evidence that an LLM (which is what I'm assuming you're referring to) could do anywhere near as well. I don't doubt that they flag some issues, but without a comprehensive, human, review of the system architecture, implementation and code, you can't be sure what they've missed, and if you're going to do that anyway, you've done the job yourself!
Having said that, I've no doubt that things will improve, programming languages have well defined syntaxes and so they should be some of the easiest types of text for an LLM to parse and build a context from. If that can be combined with enough domain knowledge, a description of the deployment environment and a model that's actually trained for and tuned for code analysis and security auditing, it might be possible to get similar results to humans.
Its just whatever is built into copilot.
You can do a quick and dirty test by opening copilot chat and asking it something like "outline the vulnerabilities found in the following code, with the vulnerabilities listed underneath it. Outline any other issues you notice that are not listed here." and then paste the code and the discovered vulns.
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The question is simple. I wanted to get a general consensus on if people actually audit the code that they use from FOSS or open source software or apps.
Do you blindly trust the FOSS community? I am trying to get a rough idea here. Sometimes audit the code? Only on mission critical apps? Not at all?
Let's hear it!
wrote on last edited by [email protected]If it looks sketchy I'll look at it and not trust the binaries. I'm not going to catch anything subtle, but if it sets up a reverse shell, I can notice that shit.
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The question is simple. I wanted to get a general consensus on if people actually audit the code that they use from FOSS or open source software or apps.
Do you blindly trust the FOSS community? I am trying to get a rough idea here. Sometimes audit the code? Only on mission critical apps? Not at all?
Let's hear it!
I don't have the know how to do so, so I go off of what others have said about it. It's at-least got a better chance of being safe than closed source software where people are FULLY guessing at if its safe or not, rather than what we have with at-least 1 person having poured over it that doesn't have ties to the creator.
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The question is simple. I wanted to get a general consensus on if people actually audit the code that they use from FOSS or open source software or apps.
Do you blindly trust the FOSS community? I am trying to get a rough idea here. Sometimes audit the code? Only on mission critical apps? Not at all?
Let's hear it!
No, so I only use well known widely used open source programs. If I'm doing a code review I'm getting paid to do it.
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The question is simple. I wanted to get a general consensus on if people actually audit the code that they use from FOSS or open source software or apps.
Do you blindly trust the FOSS community? I am trying to get a rough idea here. Sometimes audit the code? Only on mission critical apps? Not at all?
Let's hear it!
I rely on Debian repo maintainers to do this for me
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The question is simple. I wanted to get a general consensus on if people actually audit the code that they use from FOSS or open source software or apps.
Do you blindly trust the FOSS community? I am trying to get a rough idea here. Sometimes audit the code? Only on mission critical apps? Not at all?
Let's hear it!
I usually just look for CVEs. The biggest red flag is if there's 0 CVEs. The yellow flag is if the CVEs exist, but they don't have a prominent notice on their site about it.
Best case is they have a lot of CVEs, they have detailed notices on their sites that were published very shortly after the CVE was published, and they have an bug bounty program setup.
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I run projects inside Docker on a VM away from important data. It allows me to test and restrict access to specific things of my choosing.
It works well for me.
Oof, you are infected
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I usually just look for CVEs. The biggest red flag is if there's 0 CVEs. The yellow flag is if the CVEs exist, but they don't have a prominent notice on their site about it.
Best case is they have a lot of CVEs, they have detailed notices on their sites that were published very shortly after the CVE was published, and they have an bug bounty program setup.
What if the software is just so flawlessly written that there are not CVEs?
/s
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What if the software is just so flawlessly written that there are not CVEs?
/s
I maintained an open-source app for many years. It leveraged a crypto library but allowed for different algos, or none at all for testing.
Some guy wrote a CVE about "when I disable all crypto it doesn't use crypto". So there's that. It's the only CVE we got before or during my time.
But even we got one.
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I maintained an open-source app for many years. It leveraged a crypto library but allowed for different algos, or none at all for testing.
Some guy wrote a CVE about "when I disable all crypto it doesn't use crypto". So there's that. It's the only CVE we got before or during my time.
But even we got one.
Oh damn, haha.
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The question is simple. I wanted to get a general consensus on if people actually audit the code that they use from FOSS or open source software or apps.
Do you blindly trust the FOSS community? I am trying to get a rough idea here. Sometimes audit the code? Only on mission critical apps? Not at all?
Let's hear it!
Depends on what you mean by "audit".
I look at the GitHub repo.
- How many stars?
- Last commit?
- Open issues
- Contributer count
Do I read the whole code base? Of course not. But this is way more than I can do with closed source software.
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The question is simple. I wanted to get a general consensus on if people actually audit the code that they use from FOSS or open source software or apps.
Do you blindly trust the FOSS community? I am trying to get a rough idea here. Sometimes audit the code? Only on mission critical apps? Not at all?
Let's hear it!
Generally, no. On some cases where I'm extending the code or compiling it for some special case that I have, I will read the code. For example, I modified a web project to use LDAP instead of a local user file. In that case, I had to read the code to understand it. In cases where I'm recompiling the code, my pipeline will run some basic vulnerability scans automatically.
I would not consider either of these a comprehensive audit, but it's something.
Additionally, on any of my server deployments, I have firewall rules which would catch "calls to home". I've seen a few apps calling home, getting blocked but no adverse effects. The only one I can remember is Traefik, which I flipped a config value to not do that.
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The question is simple. I wanted to get a general consensus on if people actually audit the code that they use from FOSS or open source software or apps.
Do you blindly trust the FOSS community? I am trying to get a rough idea here. Sometimes audit the code? Only on mission critical apps? Not at all?
Let's hear it!
no... I do just blindly trust the code.
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The question is simple. I wanted to get a general consensus on if people actually audit the code that they use from FOSS or open source software or apps.
Do you blindly trust the FOSS community? I am trying to get a rough idea here. Sometimes audit the code? Only on mission critical apps? Not at all?
Let's hear it!
Nope! Not at all. I don't think I could find anything even if I tried. I do generally trust OS more than other apps but I feel like I'm taking a risk either way. If it's some niche thing I'm building from a git repo I'll be wary enough to not put my credit card info but that's about it
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The question is simple. I wanted to get a general consensus on if people actually audit the code that they use from FOSS or open source software or apps.
Do you blindly trust the FOSS community? I am trying to get a rough idea here. Sometimes audit the code? Only on mission critical apps? Not at all?
Let's hear it!
no. ive skimmed through maybe 2 things overall but thats about it. i use too many apps to be able to audit them all and i dont have the proper skills to audit code anyway, and even if i did i would still have to re-audit after every update or every few years. its just not worth the effort
youre taking a chance whether you use closed or open source software, at least with open source there is the option to look through things yourself, and with a popular project theres going to be a bigger chance of others looking through it
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The question is simple. I wanted to get a general consensus on if people actually audit the code that they use from FOSS or open source software or apps.
Do you blindly trust the FOSS community? I am trying to get a rough idea here. Sometimes audit the code? Only on mission critical apps? Not at all?
Let's hear it!
I look whether if someone has audited the code or not & even then I simply find Libre stuff trustworthy anyways
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The question is simple. I wanted to get a general consensus on if people actually audit the code that they use from FOSS or open source software or apps.
Do you blindly trust the FOSS community? I am trying to get a rough idea here. Sometimes audit the code? Only on mission critical apps? Not at all?
Let's hear it!
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Yes, but with an explanation.
You don't necessarily need coding skills to "audit", you can get q sense of the general state of things by simply reading the docs.
The docs are a good starting point to understand if there will be any issues from weird licensing, whether the author cares enough to keep the project going, etc. Also serious, repeated or chronic issues should be noted in the docs if its something the author cares about.
And remember, even if you do have a background in the coding language, the project might not be built in a style you like or agree with.
I'm pretty proficient at bash scripting, and I found the proxmox helper scripts a spaghetti mess of interdependent scripts that were simply a nightmare to follow for any particular install.
I think the overall message is do your best within your abilities.
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The question is simple. I wanted to get a general consensus on if people actually audit the code that they use from FOSS or open source software or apps.
Do you blindly trust the FOSS community? I am trying to get a rough idea here. Sometimes audit the code? Only on mission critical apps? Not at all?
Let's hear it!
All I do is look into the open issues, the community, docs etc. I don't remember auditing the code.
