Not discrediting Open Source Software, but nothing is 100% safe.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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I had a discussion with a security guy about this.
For software with a small community, proprietary software is safer. For software with a large community, open source is safer.
Private companies are subject to internal politics, self-serving managers, prioritizing profit over security, etc. Open source projects need enough skilled people focused on the project to ensure security. So smaller companies are more likely to do a better job, and larger open source projects are likely to do a better job.
This is why you see highly specialized software has really enterprise-y companies running it. It just works better going private, as much as I hate to say it. More general software, especially utilities like OpenSSL, is much easier to build large communities and ensure quality.
Unfortunately that is not the case. Closed sourced software for small communities are not safer. My company had an incredibly embarrassing data leak because they outsourced some work and trusted a software used also by the competitors. Unfortunately the issue was found by one of our customers and ended up on the newspapers.
Absolutely deserved, but still, closed sourced stuff is not more secure