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Re: [open-regulatory-compliance] FYI UK Government report on OSS trust - gaps

I see that for some reason, the results were not actually published on the site - there were more questions than I mentioned in the brief lightning talk.  I pushed the button to publish them and pasted the link below for anyone who is curious. Unfortunately the survey system’s analysis capabilities are kind of terrible, and there doesn't seem to be any way to publish the open-ended responses. 

There were a shockingly large number of people who said they actually run the automated tests (it was a small survey, and of course people can exaggerate, but still, I was surprised).


Vicky


On Mar 12, 2025, at 2:15 PM, Johannes Ebke <johannes.ebke@xxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Vicky,

Thanks for the Link! It's an interesting dilemma from my admittedly not-as-expert-in-dns user perspective; but my guess (in addition to the final conclusions) is that *it is really hard to evaluate if a test suite, process, or self-certification is any good!*

Tying this to the presentation that Dick (Brooks) will next Friday give to NASA/DOE; I as a user of Software personally would very much prefer to have a trust registry of /projects/ rather than /products/ (product versions) as a first step; as this could evaluate all the best practices mentioned by Vicky, and also evaluate things I would see as central to me trusting organisations, e.g. incident history of the organization or their reactions to past incidents.

All the best
Johannes



On 12.03.25 18:51, Victoria Risk via open-regulatory-compliance wrote:
Johannes, Florian -
Sort of tangential to this topic, I did a small survey last summer about what users look for in determining the risk level of an Open source project, and the results were pretty disheartening. I was approaching this from the perspective of an open source project, wondering if we were putting our efforts into the things users cared to look at.  I am a fan of the OpenSSF Best Practices badge, and that approach, in general. I was wondering if we should do more to expose, e.g. test results summaries, that sort of thing.
What I found was - there was basically no overlap between the things we were doing to ensure quality and trustworthiness, and the things the users were looking at to determine that.
I like to think that our users are pretty sophisticated…. anyway, here is a link to a summary for your amusement. (I was not asking about SBOMS because we are providing source, and I can see I forgot to even ask about code signing signature verification, but you get the idea.) At any rate, I think a lot could be done just to better educate users about what to look for.
Vicky
preview.png
2024_06_nanog_oss_risk <https://www.isc.org/docs/2024_06_nanog_oss_risk.pdf>
PDF Document · 1.5 MB <https://www.isc.org/docs/2024_06_nanog_oss_risk.pdf>
<https://www.isc.org/docs/2024_06_nanog_oss_risk.pdf>
On Mar 12, 2025, at 1:31 PM, Johannes Ebke via open-regulatory- compliance <open-regulatory-compliance@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi everyone,

Apologies to the list, this last message was supposed to go to Florian privately, therefore the language gap. If anyone else knows anything about existing trustworthiness comparisons between open- and closed- source software from different perspectives I would be interested.

All the best
Johannes Ebke

On 12.03.25 18:28, Johannes Ebke via open-regulatory-compliance wrote:
Hallo und guten Abend,
Das finde ich prinzipiell auch sehr interessant! Ich würde mich gern auf die Liste der Interessierten setzen falls das zustandekommt.
Interessant für mich wäre auch, wie man closed-source dann bezüglich trustworthiness vergleichen (oder eben nicht vergleichen) kann. Das wäre konkret wichtig um bei Kaufentscheidungen der öffentlichen Hand was sinnvolles vorzugeben. Gibt es da auch schon Ansätze?
Viele Grüße
Johannes Ebke
On 12.03.25 15:15, Idelberger, Florian (IIWR) via open-regulatory- compliance wrote:
We have recently submitted a proposal for a research project would develop sth like this. Which would be open and accessible, if funded and deployed.

--
Dr. Florian Idelberger


Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)
Zentrum für Angewandte Rechtswissenschaft (ZAR)
Institut für Informations- und Wirtschaftsrecht
Vincenz-Prießnitz-Str. 3, D-76131 Karlsruhe

E-Mail: florian.idelberger@xxxxxxx

KIT - Universität des Landes Baden-Württemberg und
nationales Forschungszentrum in der Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft

Am 12.03.2025 um 15:06 schrieb Dick Brooks via open-regulatory- compliance <open-regulatory-compliance@xxxxxxxxxxx>:

FYI:
A UK Government report on open source software contains some very specific findings and recommendation to establish trustworthiness in open source software:
https://www.securityweek.com/uk-government-report-calls-for- stronger- open-source-supply-chain-security-practices/ <https:// www.securityweek.com/uk-government-report-calls-for-stronger-open- source-supply-chain-security-practices/>
/4.1.3 Trust in Open-Source Software/
/Trust in OSS is a critical concept//when adopting OSS components.How does one/
/come to trust an OSS component?//More often than not, “there is no sound basis/
/for trust in the Software Ecosystems (SECO) hubs”, with trust being considered/
/“founded or unfounded” (Hou et al., 2022)./
//
/Outside of academic papers,trustworthiness wasn’t mentioned in any of the best/
/practices we reviewed//./
//
/This is a significant gap in the best practices landscape, as trust plays a vital role/
/in adopting OSS components/.
This is precisely why a SCITT Trust Registry is essential, to serve as a trust anchor for trustworthy software products with specific cybersecurity labels providing justification for a “trust score” in the registry, which the buying public can query before buying a product.
The US Coast Guard is planning to implement a “Trust Registry” of approved products, which limits which products can be installed in IT and OT systems used by the US Coast Guard:
https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2025-00708/p-1047 <https:// www.federalregister.gov/d/2025-00708/p-1047>
I’m doing a presentation to the US NASA and the US Department of Energy (DOE) on March 21 on this very topic of SCITT Trust Registries to identify trustworthy products that have passed a risk assessment and may be installed in IT and OT systems.
Trustworthiness of a product will be based on NIST SCRM best practices contained in CISA’s Secure Software Acquisition Guide,https:// cisa.gov/sag <https://cisa.gov/sag>
Am happy to share my March 21 slides with any that request them.
Thanks,
Dick Brooks
<image007.png><image008.png><image009.png>
/Active Member of the CISA Critical Manufacturing Sector,/
/Sector Coordinating Council – A Public-Private Partnership/
*/Never trust software, always verify and report! <https:// reliableenergyanalytics.com/products>/*™
Risk always exists, but trust must be earned and awarded.™
https://businesscyberguardian.com/ <https://businesscyberguardian.com/>
Email:dick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:dick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Tel: +1 978-696-1788
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--
Prof. Dr. Johannes Ebke - Fakultät für Informatik & Mathematik
Department of Computer Science and Mathematics
Hochschule München University of Applied Sciences
Lothstrasse 64, 80335 München, R4.033
T +49 89 1265-3756
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To unsubscribe from this list, visit https://accounts.eclipse.org

--
Prof. Dr. Johannes Ebke - Fakultät für Informatik & Mathematik
Department of Computer Science and Mathematics
Hochschule München University of Applied Sciences
Lothstrasse 64, 80335 München, R4.033
T +49 89 1265-3756
https://www.cs.hm.edu | https://www.hm.edu/datenschutz/



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