Summary
- The Linux Foundation, joined by leading organizations, today announced Akrites, a coordinated effort to remediate and disclose vulnerabilities in critical open source software.
- Akrites establishes a shared Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) and a single, standardized Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) process, built on confidentiality-first principles and industry-standard tooling.
- Founding members commit engineering talent, security expertise and funding to harden the shared open source software that banks, hospitals, power grids, telecoms, governments, and AI labs depend on.
- Organizations that contribute engineering resources or funding to the security of critical open source are invited to participate and can learn more at https://akrites.org/.
It’s nice that some resources are being directed in this area, but it’s far from a total solution.
For example, the passport-saml Node module is popular and security related and is already fielding a number of AI-assisted security vulns.
Even when they are contributed by “security experts”, they still have to be carefully vetted to confirm they are correct and not themselves malicious.
While the patches may be good, it appears to be generating more unpaid volunteer labor for the maintainers.
Thankfully there some other fund’s trying to help out maintainers of critical open source projects.