Top Twenty INFOSEC Open Sources

Our Editor Picks His Favorite Open Sources You Can Put to Work Today 

There are so many projects at sourceforge it’s hard to keep up with them.  However, that’s not where we are going to find our growing list of the top twenty infosec open sources.  Some of them have been around for a long time and continue to evolve, others are fairly new.  These are the Editor favorites that you can use at work and some at home to increase your security posture, reduce your risk and harden your systems.  While there are many great free tools out there, these are open sources which means they comply with a GPL license of some sort that you should read and feel comfortable with before deploying.  For example, typically, if you improve the code in any of these open sources, you are required to share your tweaks with the entire community – nothing proprietary here.

Here they are:

1. TrueCrypt.org – The Best Open Encryption Suite Available
2. OpenSSL.org – The Industry Standard for Web Encryption
3. OpenVAS.org – The Most Advance Open Source Vulnerability Scanner
4. NMAP.org – The World’s Most Powerful Network Fingerprint Engine
5. WireShark.org – The World’s Foremost Network Protocol Analyser
6. Metasploit.org – The Best Suite for Penetration Testing and Exploitation
7. OpenCA.org – The Leading Open Source Certificate and PKI Management -
8. Stunnel.org – The First Open Source SSL VPN Tunneling Project
9. NetFilter.org – The First Open Source Firewall Based Upon IPTables
10. ClamAV – The Industry Standard Open Source Antivirus Scanner
11. PFSense.org – The Very Powerful Open Source Firewall and Router
12. OSSIM – Open Source Security Information Event Management (SIEM)
13. OpenSwan.org – The Open Source IPSEC VPN for Linux
14. DansGuardian.org – The Award Winning Open Source Content Filter
15. OSSTMM.org – Open Source Security Test Methodology
16. CVE.MITRE.org – The World’s Most Open Vulnerability Definitions
17. OVAL.MITRE.org – The World’s Standard for Host-based Vulnerabilities
18. WiKiD Community Edition – The Best Open Two Factor Authentication
19. Suricata – Next Generation Open Source IDS/IPS Technology
20. CryptoCat – The Open Source Encrypted Instant Messaging Platform

Please do enjoy and share your comments with us – if you know of others you think should make our list of the Top Twenty Open Sources for Information Security, do let us know at marketing@cyberdefensemagazine.com.

(Source: CDM)