Public, Private Sectors Partner For Innovation

By Jennifer deJong

August 1, 2007 — Phrases like “public and private sector collaboration” get bandied about like so much talk from government officials. But sometimes it’s more than just rhetoric.

A U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program known as the Science and Technology Directorate is funding private sector research efforts to drive development of technologies that would help secure the Internet and other critical networks, on which much of the U.S. economy depends.

In January 2006 application security toolmaker Coverity, Stanford University and anti-virus software maker Symantec were jointly awarded about US$1 million from DHS. The contract funds a project known as “Vulnerability Discovery and Remediation Open?Source Hardening,” designed to make sure that widely used open source offerings, including Apache, FreeBSD, GTK, Linux, Mozilla, MySQL and PostgreSQL, are secure, said Coverity CEO Seth Hallem. The two-part effort identifies potential weaknesses in open source software and then provides the necessary remediation. “The contract has allowed us to conduct new research,” he said. It lets DHS take advantage of the findings, while also providing it with a pathway to commercialize that research, he said.

Hallem did not offer further details of the project, but said results of the research effort will make their way into the next release of Prevent, Coverity’s source code analyzer for C, C++ and Java.

Share this link: http://sdt.bz/30987

Technorati

Digg

Slashdot

Facebook

Friendfeed

Twitter

del.icio.us

VMware announces open-source project to enable Apache Hadoop to run on private and public clouds VMware announced a new open source project to enable enterprises to quickly deploy Apache Hadoop in cloud environments

WSO2 rolls out PaaS for public, private clouds This open-source middleware platform aims for data-as-a-service and multi-tenancy

Eucalyptus Systems takes public clouds private Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara have developed an open-source platform for the creation of hybrid cloud environments. The Eucalyptus platform emulates private clouds, such as Amazon AWS.