Creating and distributing useful software requires significant intellectual, emotional, temporal, and financial resources. Security software tends to require some level of operational security around vulnerability disclosures, and often carries some unique ethical and legal implications. On top of all this, “open source” often means there is no paycheck at the end of the week for programming effort. Why go to all the trouble? Why do some open source security projects succeed while many others fail? What does success even mean for open source?
This talk by Thomas d’Otreppe (Aircrack-NG project lead) and Tod Beardsley (Metasploit engineering manager) will explore the unique challenges (and rewards!) faced by open source security projects. They will discuss strategies to keep projects and contributors on track, provide resources that make the life of an open source developer more productive and rewarding, and offer their unique insight into open source security development. Participants in this talk will come away with the tools and knowledge needed to launch a new open source security project or more effectively contribute to an existing one.
Tod Beardsley is the Engineering Manager for the Metasploit Project, the world-renowned open source penetration testing platform. He has over twenty years of hands-on security knowledge, reaching back to the halcyon days of 2400 baud textfile BBSes and in-band telephony switching. Since then, he has held IT Ops and IT Security positions in large footprint organizations such as 3Com, Dell,and Westinghouse. Today, he is passionate (some might say militant) about open source software development, open source security research, and data liberation, and can often be found on Freenode IRC as “todb.”
Thomas d’Otreppe “Mister X” is a wifi hacker and the author of Aircrack-ng, a Wi-Fi auditing suite and OpenWIPS-ng, an open source modular wireless IPS. He has designed Offensive-Security WiFu, a proactive wireless security course, with Mati Aharoni and also contributed to BackTrack Linux. He works as a software developer for Main Nerve.