The Core Infrastructure Initiative revisited
Core Values
© Lead Image © Maxim Kazim, 123RF.com
How does the Core Infrastructure Initiative fare three years in?
The Linux Foundation started the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) [1] after the discovery of several security vulnerabilities in 2014. As serious as the bugs themselves was the discovery that many core Linux projects were unequipped to respond to them. The CII was started in an effort to alleviate and prevent such bugs in the future. But how is the CII doing three years after its founding? For answers, I talked with Nicko van Someren of the CII.
According to van Someren, 2014 was marked by the discovery of a number of vulnerabilities. They included the ShellShock bug in Bash and a denial of service attack through the Network Time Protocol. However, the bug that received the most public attention was Heartbleed [2], which had infected the OpenSSL cryptography library for two years before its discovery. As Heartbleed was patched, it became obvious that the OpenSSL project, like many other Linux packages, lacked both the funding and the developers to respond adequately to such a threat.
The discovery of Heartbleed – deliberately named to attract attention – marked "the realization as to just how dependent commercial software has become on open source components," van Someren says. "The urgency of Heartbleed meant that vendors needed to fix things immediately and needed to tell people why." However, the CII is not just the software equivalent of a fire department responding to each crisis as it emerges. "Our goal with identifying projects that are at risk is so that we can provide help and resources – before – there is an urgent problem," von Someren says.
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