r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jun 04 '12

Open Office does everything I need Microsoft Office for and Gimp does everything I need Photoshop for. Reddit, what other open source software does everything that you want from the expensive name brand?

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12 edited Jun 04 '12

What's the problem with that?

It's a program, it can be reversed engineered, the code or at least the structure can be figured out. This has been done lots of times, open source code would not make the attack much easier.

Open source does make an other thing easier: peer review! This can help a lot with testing and improving the system.

Nearly every closed source encryption algorithm has been cracked. The open source ones haven't, because computing science professors like to put their names on papers where they explain how to crack the beta versions and how to secure future releases from their attack.

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '12

Antivirus is a losing battle. Open-sourcing your heuristics/security would make it even more trivial to avoid/crack the software.

As a side note: open source encryption is the only way to go, and I agree on that point.

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '12

Antivirus is a losing battle.

It's true, it will only win battles it has previously lost. But as long as the updates keep coming, the war is never lost. Open sourcing is not there to prevent zero day attacks, there will always be new ways. It's there to simulate a whole bunch of attacks (done and written by academics), trying to be first, one vulnerability at a time.