Open Networking & the Security of Open Source Software Deployment

There are many initiatives driving open architectures and virtualised telecoms infrastructure.  The use of software from open source in a range of architectural deployments is rapidly increasing such as a software component running on virtualised infrastructure, to provide virtualised middleware, or within proprietary code implementation.

Open Source Software (OSS) has a number of advantages, notably including that source code is accessible and subject to inspection, a wide community of developers can contribute and there is potential to accelerate telco cloud implementation. In contrast, there are various best practice steps that aim to ‘make secure software’ but none of these are mandated in the open source community whose main focus is functionality.  Hence, there is also security value in utilising proprietary code solution as it may have benefitted from secure code development practices.  This whitepaper explores security practices that can make OSS deployments secure including consideration of the wider operating environment.

The whitepaper was developed by building a security research evidence base.  Download your copy to the accompanying research paper here.