In the very early days of the emergence of open-source as a concept through which to develop and distribute software, putting that concept alongside the consideration of security made for somewhat of a paradox. I mean if absolutely anybody and everybody can see the source code, that means anybody and everybody can devise ways of cracking the security built into that software, right?
Right, however, that’s not the be all and end all of it. While it is true that nefarious users and malicious hackers tend to get somewhat of a security breaching head-start by mere virtue of being able to scope the source code at their leisure, the beauty of what the open-source concept is all about resides in how the community of contributors was forced to think about security.
In this way what is perhaps the best approach to digital security has emerged because the approach to developing digital security forces the standard to be one of the security features not being able to be breached, regardless of the fact that their anatomy is publicly known. What I mean by this is that if you look at one-way encryption for example, every developer who swears by this encryption knows exactly how it works, but regardless of this knowledge they also know that it’s as secure as encryption gets.
The fact that you’re acquainted with the encryption algorithm used by a standard website which uses open source encryption doesn’t make you any wiser to the process of possibly cracking that encryption. That’s the beauty of open source – the developers who contribute to its development bring everything including the kitchen sink in terms of efficiency, a by-product of which is the absolute best security out there.
I hope I’m not getting too technical, but if you were ask any programmer who is familiar with open-source scripting languages like PHP in comparison to proprietary scripting software like Microsoft’s PHP equivalent which exists in the form of ASP.net, they would tell you that there isn’t much of a difference, if any at all of note! In fact, some would even go as far as saying that ASP.net pretty much copies every procedure developed in the open source language of PHP and then simply adds some features which are only accessible to any developer who obtains a license to use that platform.
Seriously, even the syntax is almost exactly the same and yet if you wanted to develop and commercially deploy a web application in ASP.net as opposed to PHP, you’d have to fork out a handsome sum of money for the development environment, in the form of the Visual Studio Suite.
So if you enjoy playing something like Baccarat Squeeze online over your favourite online gaming platform to which you’d naturally furnish with your personal details, the fact that many of such online gaming platforms are running over open source developed platforms should not have you doubting the security they offer. The security associated with open source programming and scripting languages is the best you can ever get because it is security that is contributed to by a dynamic team of programmers who deal with real life threats that come with in-deployment situations.
