Company
Date Published
Author
Liran Tal
Word count
1787
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Open source maintainers face significant security challenges, with many lacking necessary skills and knowledge to ensure their projects are secure. A majority of maintainers (63%) believe they have medium-level security know-how, while only 30% rank themselves as high. However, a significant number (70%) admit to not having strong security knowledge. Many maintainers do not conduct regular security audits, with one in four reporting that they never run an audit. Despite this, there is a positive trend towards repeated auditing actions. Maintainers often find out about vulnerabilities through public channels or by reviewing their own code personally. The average time-to-fix for a vulnerability is around 2.5 years, highlighting the need for more proactive security measures. A responsible disclosure policy can help maintainers respond quickly to security issues and provide a window of time for users to upgrade to fixed versions.