Oss security hardening overview

Abstract

In today's computing world, security takes an increasingly predominant role. The industry is facing challenges in public confidence at the discovery of vulnerabilities and customers are expecting security to be delivered out of the box, even on programs that were not designed with security in mind. Software maintainers face the challenge to improve the security of their programs and are often under-equipped to do so. Some are taking advantage of open source software as the availability of the source code facilitates their validation and answers their need for trustworthy programs. This paper summarizes key concepts related to security hardening, and demonstrates its applicability on the C language. It also proposes a progressive approach to integrate security services and protection measures into existing software to ultimately make it more resistant against cyber-attacks.