In the previous decade or so, open source software has ended up being a vital component of many companies’ tech stacks. The expansion of cloud computing and expert system (AI) accelerated this pattern, making open source tasks such as Kubernetes, TensorFlow, Jenkins, and OpenCV more appealing to developers and facilities teams alike.
And security operations are no exception. Open source software has found its method into cybersecurity engineering and operations. Snort, OpenSSL, Yara, Wireshark, etc, are often discovered in organizations’ arsenal of security tools. Open source is now basic to security operations, and building, supporting, and using open source tools is an integral part of InfoSec culture.
To better track the expansion of open source software in cybersecurity infrastructure and applications, Andrew Smyth of Atlantic Bridge and I produced The Open Source Security Index as a totally free resource for developers and security engineers to discover and recognize the best open source security innovation. The index lists the leading 100 most popular and fastest-growing security projects on GitHub. We highlight quick growing as our company believe modern-day security operations are various from security in the past, when most implementations took place on-premises. As such, a number of the fast-growing OSS jobs are newer efforts designed for contemporary facilities environments.
To develop this index, we utilize the GitHub API to pull jobs based upon tags and topics, and manually added jobs that do not have labels. To constrain our scope, we restricted the search to tasks that are thought about direct security tools. Those that have security implications however fall more into infrastructure capabilities, such as Terraform, Elastic, Istio, and Envoy, are not consisted of here.How We Ranked the Entries When we had the raw list, we ranked entries based on an
“Index Rating, “which is a weighted average of 6 metrics obtained from GitHub. They consist of: Variety of stars: 30% Variety of factors(excluding
- bots and confidential accounts
- ): 25%Number of devotes the job had in the last 12 months: 25%
- Number of watchers: 10 %Modification in the number of watchers over the last month: 5%
- Number of forks: 5% Based on this scoring
- methodology, we note the leading
100 GitHub tasks on the The Open Source Security Index site. The index is an evolving, live project. We will revitalize the information month-to-month to keep the list existing. While the top 25 list includes familiar tools like Metasploit, Wireshark, and OS Inquiry,
there are also reasonably brand-new entrants, such as Cilium, Checkov, and Calico, that are created particularly for contemporary and cloud-native facilities. Looking throughout the top 25 list, a few interesting patterns emerge.
They are: Attack and red-team open source tools remain popular: Jobs that offer efficientattack and screening tools are prominently placed on the list. Metasploit, OSS Fuzz, Atomic Red Team, and Zap are a few examples.Security for modern-day facilities is getting appeal: Unlike standard security utilities, projects such as Cilium, Trivy, Calico, and Sysdig are becoming progressively popular. Those projects are created to deal with more recent, cloud-native facilities, such as Kubernetes, containers, and microservices. The fact that these tasks are listed amongst the most popular shows that cloud computing is now mainstream with security operations.Automation and “as-code”workflow utilities have actually emerged: It’s likewise worth keeping in mind that jobs that enable automation and “as-code”workflows have likewise appeared in the top list. For example, Nuclei, a task that focuses on vulnerability-management-as-code, is a fast-growing job utilized by bug scientists, red teams, and protectors. Sigma is another job that allows automation and sharing of attack detection techniques. Our company believe that the development of open source security (OSS)will follow the same trajectory as business infrastructure in embracing OSS designs. An increasing number of security professionals choose open source as a fundamental technique because
of its extensibility, versatility, and transparency of execution. In addition, advanced security teams have embraced the “shift-left” state of mind, where handling security policies and operations is like handling “code.”To this end, an open source technique supplies a clear benefit compared to the standard way of developing and releasing proprietary software application artifacts. We produced this index due to the fact that we had a tough time finding a great, representative list of open source security tasks. Although imperfect, this index represents a starting point to construct a structured and detailed list of significant open source tools for security professionals to consider. We worked with many open source creators to develop this list, and we invite feedback at @OSecurityIndex.