5 ms·

I see this sentiment all the time, but it could never apply to the defense sector. Do you really want our nations enemies to have access to the source code of

by _mlbt 3y ago

I see this sentiment all the time, but it could never apply to the defense sector. Do you really want our nations enemies to have access to the source code of fighter jets, cruise missiles, the nuclear weapons program, or missile defense systems?

convolvatron 3y ago
ok. most. and an aside note do you really want the national defense to be one thumb drive away from total collapse?
a_simple_man 3y ago
how are those systems going to be secure without being audited by the market? the reality is that this military industrial complex is just a way to print money and funnel it into the hands of a few criminals. all of the major news publications openly told you that the USA has been attacked over 100 times in the middle east AND WE LEFT. The public is going to find out very soon that this massive, expensive military can't actually defend against or defeat other militaries. That when you spend $1000 on a hammer everything looks really flashy and impressive AT FIRST with your fancy jets and missile systems, but after enough time, and after enough of the money has been funneled out, you realize it's a paper army. the USA is so weak that Iran is pushing them out of the middle east and there's nothing the theives that run the military can do about it. but don't worry. they already manufactured a Palestine sympathy story ahead of time to explain why they have to pull out and run away like the cowards they are. and your son's and neighbors sons will pay the price with their lives
- SteveNuts 3y ago
  Every time I’ve been involved with selling software in any way adjacent to national security they’ve required source code review.
  - a_simple_man 3y ago
    How are you equating a "code review" to open source, the difference is the difference between asking a couple dudes for advice and asking the entire world for advice. I'm sure the argument sounded really good in your head, but let's be adults here when it comes to the United States military
    - Veserv 3y ago
      Because auditable does not mean the same thing as audited. It is silly that people keep pushing that dead argument after Heartbleed pounded a stake through its heart. Audits are time consuming, challenging, and boring. Experience shows even critical, high profile projects hardly get any review at all by the "world", let alone actual audits by competent domain experts. Quality verification depends on auditing and auditing depends on competent, trusted review and testing. Global transparency is not a substitute for auditing except when discussing absolute rock-bottom standards. Reviewable is significantly better than unreviewed and unreviewable, but that is the lowest possible bar. Unfortunately, software does, as a general rule, have rock-bottom auditing standards, so FOSS does provide meaningful assurance increases in many use cases. But, that is a artifact of the abysmal quality standards rather than any sort of inherent auditing advantage that FOSS provides. That is not to say that global transparency is not valuable for other reasons, but it provides no meaningful quality verification or auditing advantage in serious applications versus local transparency (to the trusted reviewer). If you want to see how this works in practice, look at literally every other industry.
      - a_simple_man 3y ago
        the market will determine what should and should not be audited, according to supply and demand. thinking that a couple employees that were not paid for with profit but with printed and taxed government dollars is not and never will be a substitute for the free market, which is a synonym for humanity. not respecting that fact will always result in loss and inefficiency. and no amount of paragraphs can undo that.
        Avamander 3y ago
mrwyz 3y ago
"never apply". https://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/ https://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/
- _mlbt 3y ago
  “All”
b112 3y ago
Open Source != GPL. Nor on Github. I don't know what the parent fully meant, but I do know that some agencies have full access to some Microsoft source code. From where I sit, I find it absurd that everything we use isn't open source. Again, not free, but the code given to purchasers. You don't need closed source to protect IP, and the proof is in all of these API lawsuits, and copyright law. I don't want my missiles to not have code I cannot edit, and stepping back from the top secret sphere, tangential I am appalled at how crappy car firmwares are closed source. In the old days, a country's national transport agencies could look at evey linkage, every rod, every part of a car design. Now 90% of the design is hidden. And with electric cars, it's even more firmware. And the idea that OTA updates are a thing for cars. The madness. The absolute madness. How much do you want to bet that charging firmwares are remotely updatable? Now imagine that 9am on Monday, every electric car explodes? Even today, that would mean an immense number of houses on fire. How could the fire department handle it? And how could it be handled as the fires spread? And what if lots of other infra goes up? And that's today. What about when 90% of transportationn is electric? Even if not a single house or building burned, or person was hurt, how would you replace all those buses, trucks, delivery vehicles, and cars? As COVID showed us, you cannot ramp up and down overnight. And what if it happened to all our allies? Would they still sell part to us? What of all the tractors are electric, and we miss corn and wheat planting season? My point in this tangent is... no one is even looking at the important bits. And to reiterate, how much do you want to bet charging firmwares are remotely updated? Really, they should be air gapped from the entire rest of the car. Letting potential hackers have access in this way, is just plain lazy and reckless.
- bongodongobob 3y ago
  That's all fine and good but I don't want missiles with code you can edit. I didn't vote for you, nor do I trust you.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Nobody said random users should be able to edit. FOSS means the code is available, not that they're going to take patches. (See sqlite for an extreme case - code is public domain, but they more or less don't take contributions)
nurple 3y ago
This is actually not a bad idea for an international peace treaty. If you make weapons, they must be open source. If the real power in these tools is the secrecy behind their design and implementation, seems like a great way to suck the power out of them.
- dh2022 3y ago
  This strategy would fall apart when you encounter an adversary willing to sacrifice its own people. Nations that care about their own people need to keep a technological advantage on the battlefield.
  - cess11 3y ago
    States don't care.
    - dh2022 3y ago
      Believe it or not, USA government cares at least a little. USA did not institute the draft even when fighting on two fronts (Afghanistan and Iraq). USA made up for the lack in manpower with technology: Reaper drones, cluster munitions, night vision, precise artillery, overwhelming air power.
      - nurple 3y ago
        Don't you find it a bit frightening that this tech is daily giving a smaller and smaller subset of people in the world the unilateral ability to project their will onto the world? At least if they tried to draft in an unjust war, the people could withhold their physical support. This was pretty effective during the Vietnam area, but it's a bargaining chip we've lost. As we saw with 702, we really have very little leverage left in what our gov does anymore, the threat of being voted out even carries little power, exactly because they're systematically removing humans from every loop they can for the purpose of working unilaterally even when--perhaps especially when--it's against the will of the people. The spooks themselves have literally said exactly as much in their fight against privacy. To me, the latest 702 is more terrifying than any adversary. When we, who the government should be beholden to, cannot even know the text of the laws which apply to us, it really puts a fine point on how the those who run our government view themselves in relation to its citizenry. "The liberties of people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them." -Patrick Henry
_akhe 3y ago
Open-source doesn't mean "not secure" - the nuclear codes would be in the .env obv >.> Seriously though - the software itself would be separated from secrets architecturally. And because it's open and anyone in the world can contribute it could be superior code than what some private government tech contractor could come up with. For the equipment use case like jets and missiles, a separate directive component (driver) would likely be necessary anyway, not just for security/privacy but because different nations have different equipment. We use F-16s, M-16s, Autel drones, etc. This driver/directive component would be the manufacturer's IP - like an nvidia GPU driver. Think of it like we'd all be running/contributing the same OS but because we have different hardware and security needs there are still some private components. The idea/goal here is that our defense companies would overall benefit from it. Not just because the software is improved, but you can justify funding, build curricula around it - might benefit the defense industry to modernize their tech practices.
- abstractbeliefs 3y ago
  The problem is that not all the secrets are so easily extracted - sometimes the design/software is the secret. If you put all the design up for nuclear weapons but just kept the nuclear codes secret it's great that no one can fire ours, but people could implement the design on their own with different codes. To use a more realistic example, consider air defence missile systems use to shoot down incoming missiles and drones. The secrets here aren't keys, it's software-driven behaviours including the approach to identify radar tracks as hostile or noise, identify when to commit a missile and how to target it, the code implicitly contains the vulnerabilities where the radar tracking is less effective and more evadable and how the system tries to mitigate this, etc. When you take away all the secret behaviours, you quickly end up with not much more than just the drivers connecting the hardware to the logic, which isn't a lot of code that's driving the funding. How you set a missile tubes tilt and direction is trivial stuff and is mostly reused from old platforms that were funded decades ago. Additionally, there is some talk about how this is kind of like security through obscurity. When it comes to things like weapons and other high-tech capabilities, security isn't only security against being owned, it's security against your opponent closing the technological gap. Unfair wars, where you have a significant tech lead on your opponent, means your population bleeds less.
prepend 3y ago
Certainly. It’s not like giving them the source code would increase risk significantly, if the software is designed well. I think it would actually strengthen as more researchers would study and submit contribs. I think Linux is as or more secure than windows and it’s open source. There’s tons of sensitive systems that are open source. It’s a design fallacy that security through obscurity is good.
- gray_-_wolf 3y ago
  > It’s not like giving them the source code would increase risk significantly I like free software a lot, and do not know much about weapon development, but would not the software reveal a lot about capabilities of the weapon platform? The argument to keep the software private might not be motivated just by attempt to hide security holes, but also by desire to hide what the weapon can do, what are the operational limits, etc.
- tester756 3y ago
  >It’s a design fallacy that security through obscurity is good. Yet, still obscurity increases security. Reverse engineering is not trivial and raises the bar.
  - prepend 3y ago
    > Yet, still obscurity increases security. I disagree and think obscurity decreases security. It just gives the false belief of security.
    - tester756 2y ago
      Reverse engineering is not trivial and raises the bar.
  - fsflover 3y ago
    Any relevant links? I can share this: https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2008/09/02/three-approaches-to-computer-security.html https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2008/09/02/three-approaches...
cess11 3y ago
Why not?
xyst 3y ago
Closed source is a recipe for disaster. Many attacks on important infrastructure have been because of closed source/proprietary software. - Stuxnet (developed to attack PLCs which control nuclear centrifuges) - Petya (targeted Microsoft developed systems and software and brought governments and states to their knees. Notably Ukraine)
SoftTalker 3y ago
> Do you really want our nations enemies to have access to the source code of fighter jets, cruise missiles, the nuclear weapons program, or missile defense systems They likely already do. Between exploiting remote vulnerabilites (a nation-state intrusion will never even be noticed -- they aren't going to encrypt all the files and ask for ransom) and old-fashioned spycraft, it would be really amazing if all the contractors involved on those projects had perfect security.
derf_ 3y ago
From my time working in defense contracting, quite a lot of the software was open source, built on open source components (just like everything else) or even hosted on official military GitHub repos. Code written by the (federal) government itself cannot even be copyrighted (in the US). Obviously you are not going to find the classified stuff on GitHub, but even there it was very common for the government to take all of the source code from one contractor and hand it to another one to work on. You also design your systems so that as much as possible can be unclassified, because unclassified development is much, much easier.
advael 3y ago
Unironically yes. Auditable software is inherently more secure, especially over the kind of timescale relevant to governments
newsclues 3y ago
Open source doesn’t mean freely available online for everyone

by _mlbt 3y ago

convolvatron 3y ago

ok. most. and an aside note do you really want the national defense to be one thumb drive away from total collapse?

a_simple_man 3y ago

how are those systems going to be secure without being audited by the market? the reality is that this military industrial complex is just a way to print money and funnel it into the hands of a few criminals. all of the major news publications openly told you that the USA has been attacked over 100 times in the middle east AND WE LEFT. The public is going to find out very soon that this massive, expensive military can't actually defend against or defeat other militaries. That when you spend $1000 on a hammer everything looks really flashy and impressive AT FIRST with your fancy jets and missile systems, but after enough time, and after enough of the money has been funneled out, you realize it's a paper army. the USA is so weak that Iran is pushing them out of the middle east and there's nothing the theives that run the military can do about it. but don't worry. they already manufactured a Palestine sympathy story ahead of time to explain why they have to pull out and run away like the cowards they are. and your son's and neighbors sons will pay the price with their lives

SteveNuts 3y ago
Every time I’ve been involved with selling software in any way adjacent to national security they’ve required source code review.
- a_simple_man 3y ago
  How are you equating a "code review" to open source, the difference is the difference between asking a couple dudes for advice and asking the entire world for advice. I'm sure the argument sounded really good in your head, but let's be adults here when it comes to the United States military
  - Veserv 3y ago
    Because auditable does not mean the same thing as audited. It is silly that people keep pushing that dead argument after Heartbleed pounded a stake through its heart. Audits are time consuming, challenging, and boring. Experience shows even critical, high profile projects hardly get any review at all by the "world", let alone actual audits by competent domain experts. Quality verification depends on auditing and auditing depends on competent, trusted review and testing. Global transparency is not a substitute for auditing except when discussing absolute rock-bottom standards. Reviewable is significantly better than unreviewed and unreviewable, but that is the lowest possible bar. Unfortunately, software does, as a general rule, have rock-bottom auditing standards, so FOSS does provide meaningful assurance increases in many use cases. But, that is a artifact of the abysmal quality standards rather than any sort of inherent auditing advantage that FOSS provides. That is not to say that global transparency is not valuable for other reasons, but it provides no meaningful quality verification or auditing advantage in serious applications versus local transparency (to the trusted reviewer). If you want to see how this works in practice, look at literally every other industry.
    - a_simple_man 3y ago
      the market will determine what should and should not be audited, according to supply and demand. thinking that a couple employees that were not paid for with profit but with printed and taxed government dollars is not and never will be a substitute for the free market, which is a synonym for humanity. not respecting that fact will always result in loss and inefficiency. and no amount of paragraphs can undo that.
      - Avamander 3y ago

mrwyz 3y ago

"never apply". https://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/ https://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/

_mlbt 3y ago
“All”

b112 3y ago

Open Source != GPL. Nor on Github. I don't know what the parent fully meant, but I do know that some agencies have full access to some Microsoft source code. From where I sit, I find it absurd that everything we use isn't open source. Again, not free, but the code given to purchasers. You don't need closed source to protect IP, and the proof is in all of these API lawsuits, and copyright law. I don't want my missiles to not have code I cannot edit, and stepping back from the top secret sphere, tangential I am appalled at how crappy car firmwares are closed source. In the old days, a country's national transport agencies could look at evey linkage, every rod, every part of a car design. Now 90% of the design is hidden. And with electric cars, it's even more firmware. And the idea that OTA updates are a thing for cars. The madness. The absolute madness. How much do you want to bet that charging firmwares are remotely updatable? Now imagine that 9am on Monday, every electric car explodes? Even today, that would mean an immense number of houses on fire. How could the fire department handle it? And how could it be handled as the fires spread? And what if lots of other infra goes up? And that's today. What about when 90% of transportationn is electric? Even if not a single house or building burned, or person was hurt, how would you replace all those buses, trucks, delivery vehicles, and cars? As COVID showed us, you cannot ramp up and down overnight. And what if it happened to all our allies? Would they still sell part to us? What of all the tractors are electric, and we miss corn and wheat planting season? My point in this tangent is... no one is even looking at the important bits. And to reiterate, how much do you want to bet charging firmwares are remotely updated? Really, they should be air gapped from the entire rest of the car. Letting potential hackers have access in this way, is just plain lazy and reckless.

bongodongobob 3y ago
That's all fine and good but I don't want missiles with code you can edit. I didn't vote for you, nor do I trust you.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Nobody said random users should be able to edit. FOSS means the code is available, not that they're going to take patches. (See sqlite for an extreme case - code is public domain, but they more or less don't take contributions)

nurple 3y ago

This is actually not a bad idea for an international peace treaty. If you make weapons, they must be open source. If the real power in these tools is the secrecy behind their design and implementation, seems like a great way to suck the power out of them.

dh2022 3y ago
This strategy would fall apart when you encounter an adversary willing to sacrifice its own people. Nations that care about their own people need to keep a technological advantage on the battlefield.
- cess11 3y ago
  States don't care.
  - dh2022 3y ago
    Believe it or not, USA government cares at least a little. USA did not institute the draft even when fighting on two fronts (Afghanistan and Iraq). USA made up for the lack in manpower with technology: Reaper drones, cluster munitions, night vision, precise artillery, overwhelming air power.
    - nurple 3y ago
      Don't you find it a bit frightening that this tech is daily giving a smaller and smaller subset of people in the world the unilateral ability to project their will onto the world? At least if they tried to draft in an unjust war, the people could withhold their physical support. This was pretty effective during the Vietnam area, but it's a bargaining chip we've lost. As we saw with 702, we really have very little leverage left in what our gov does anymore, the threat of being voted out even carries little power, exactly because they're systematically removing humans from every loop they can for the purpose of working unilaterally even when--perhaps especially when--it's against the will of the people. The spooks themselves have literally said exactly as much in their fight against privacy. To me, the latest 702 is more terrifying than any adversary. When we, who the government should be beholden to, cannot even know the text of the laws which apply to us, it really puts a fine point on how the those who run our government view themselves in relation to its citizenry. "The liberties of people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them." -Patrick Henry

_akhe 3y ago

Open-source doesn't mean "not secure" - the nuclear codes would be in the .env obv >.> Seriously though - the software itself would be separated from secrets architecturally. And because it's open and anyone in the world can contribute it could be superior code than what some private government tech contractor could come up with. For the equipment use case like jets and missiles, a separate directive component (driver) would likely be necessary anyway, not just for security/privacy but because different nations have different equipment. We use F-16s, M-16s, Autel drones, etc. This driver/directive component would be the manufacturer's IP - like an nvidia GPU driver. Think of it like we'd all be running/contributing the same OS but because we have different hardware and security needs there are still some private components. The idea/goal here is that our defense companies would overall benefit from it. Not just because the software is improved, but you can justify funding, build curricula around it - might benefit the defense industry to modernize their tech practices.

abstractbeliefs 3y ago
The problem is that not all the secrets are so easily extracted - sometimes the design/software is the secret. If you put all the design up for nuclear weapons but just kept the nuclear codes secret it's great that no one can fire ours, but people could implement the design on their own with different codes. To use a more realistic example, consider air defence missile systems use to shoot down incoming missiles and drones. The secrets here aren't keys, it's software-driven behaviours including the approach to identify radar tracks as hostile or noise, identify when to commit a missile and how to target it, the code implicitly contains the vulnerabilities where the radar tracking is less effective and more evadable and how the system tries to mitigate this, etc. When you take away all the secret behaviours, you quickly end up with not much more than just the drivers connecting the hardware to the logic, which isn't a lot of code that's driving the funding. How you set a missile tubes tilt and direction is trivial stuff and is mostly reused from old platforms that were funded decades ago. Additionally, there is some talk about how this is kind of like security through obscurity. When it comes to things like weapons and other high-tech capabilities, security isn't only security against being owned, it's security against your opponent closing the technological gap. Unfair wars, where you have a significant tech lead on your opponent, means your population bleeds less.

prepend 3y ago

Certainly. It’s not like giving them the source code would increase risk significantly, if the software is designed well. I think it would actually strengthen as more researchers would study and submit contribs. I think Linux is as or more secure than windows and it’s open source. There’s tons of sensitive systems that are open source. It’s a design fallacy that security through obscurity is good.

gray_-_wolf 3y ago
> It’s not like giving them the source code would increase risk significantly I like free software a lot, and do not know much about weapon development, but would not the software reveal a lot about capabilities of the weapon platform? The argument to keep the software private might not be motivated just by attempt to hide security holes, but also by desire to hide what the weapon can do, what are the operational limits, etc.
tester756 3y ago
>It’s a design fallacy that security through obscurity is good. Yet, still obscurity increases security. Reverse engineering is not trivial and raises the bar.
- prepend 3y ago
  > Yet, still obscurity increases security. I disagree and think obscurity decreases security. It just gives the false belief of security.
  - tester756 2y ago
    Reverse engineering is not trivial and raises the bar.
- fsflover 3y ago
  Any relevant links? I can share this: https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2008/09/02/three-approaches-to-computer-security.html https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2008/09/02/three-approaches...

cess11 3y ago

Why not?

xyst 3y ago

Closed source is a recipe for disaster. Many attacks on important infrastructure have been because of closed source/proprietary software. - Stuxnet (developed to attack PLCs which control nuclear centrifuges) - Petya (targeted Microsoft developed systems and software and brought governments and states to their knees. Notably Ukraine)

SoftTalker 3y ago

> Do you really want our nations enemies to have access to the source code of fighter jets, cruise missiles, the nuclear weapons program, or missile defense systems They likely already do. Between exploiting remote vulnerabilites (a nation-state intrusion will never even be noticed -- they aren't going to encrypt all the files and ask for ransom) and old-fashioned spycraft, it would be really amazing if all the contractors involved on those projects had perfect security.

derf_ 3y ago

From my time working in defense contracting, quite a lot of the software was open source, built on open source components (just like everything else) or even hosted on official military GitHub repos. Code written by the (federal) government itself cannot even be copyrighted (in the US). Obviously you are not going to find the classified stuff on GitHub, but even there it was very common for the government to take all of the source code from one contractor and hand it to another one to work on. You also design your systems so that as much as possible can be unclassified, because unclassified development is much, much easier.

advael 3y ago

Unironically yes. Auditable software is inherently more secure, especially over the kind of timescale relevant to governments

newsclues 3y ago

Open source doesn’t mean freely available online for everyone