I support free and open source software (FOSS) like VLC, Qbittorrent, Libre Office, Gimp…

But why do people say that it’s as secure or more secure than closed source software? From what I understand, closed source software don’t disclose their code.

If you want to see the source code of Photoshop, you actually need to work for Adobe. Otherwise, you need to be some kind of freaking retro-engineering expert.

But open source has their code available to the entire world on Github or Gitlab.

Isn’t that actually also helping hackers?

  • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    13·
    19 hours ago

    The code being public helps with spotting issues or backdoors.

    A recent example of this is to see the extent that the TALOS group had to do to reverse engineer Dell ControlVault impacting hundreds of models of Dell laptops. This blog post goes through all of the steps they had to take to reverse engineer things, and they note fortunately there was some Linux support with publicly available shared objects with debug symbols, that helped them reverse the ecosystem. Dell has all this source code, and could have identified these issues much more easily themselves, but didn’t and shipped an insecure product leaving the customers vulnerable.