Security issues in information systems based on open-source technologies

The open-source paradigm and its philosophy is rapidly becoming a well established approach in the development process of applications and information systems. The incorporation of open-source based tools and software products presents no difficulties, however certain security issues remain open for discussion. Throughout the paper we wish to give a clear and concise overview of security issues which appertain to software design and implementation based on open-source methodology. In our discussion, we are particularly concerned with the development of open-source based information systems which further incorporate various open-source or at least open technologies. The general idea of this paper is not only to present our approach to securing the environment in a distributed information system, but also to elucidate security benefits, concepts, and some general notions on the open-source paradigm.