Having many more eyes watching the code and a community of developers backing up users, open source security applications provide a wide range of options and made-to-order uses. Here's a list of 10 serious open source security applications, gathered via the word-of-mouth of the CSOs who use them.

There are many new interesting alternative operating systems: Syllable, Haiku etc. They may promise speed, low system requirements and many good and promising features. But what about security? Is it discussed enough?

On the age of Internet can we even imagine a desktop operating system without a network connection? With networking comes the need for security.

There's no such thing as perfect security. There are no programs that give you absolute software security. After all, security is a process, not a product. Linux's security process, though, is outstanding, which is one reason why it has great security. Here's an example.

Network Security Toolkit is one of many live CD Linux distributions focusing on network monitoring, analysis, and security. NST was designed to give network security administrators easy access to a comprehensive set of open source network applications, many of which are among the top 100 security tools recommended by insecure.org.

Linux security may seem daunting, but there are a host of best practices to simplify the maze. Recently, Steve Grubb of Red Hat Inc. outlined some important security principles, including minimizing admin access, the increasing sophistication of SELinux and the importance of auditing systems.

The publications on this page represent contributions by members of the IBM Linux® Technology Center to the development community on the topic of Linux security.

Security, the experts like to tell us, is a process, not a product. With open source that can be a very good thing since when security problems are found they can be fixed quickly. That's the case over this last weekend, Feb. 9-10, when a security problem was found, and given a hot fix

The regularity with which Microsoft has taken to announcing vulnerabilities and consequent software fixes has left few cheering about its security. In contrast, high expectations endure for open source, with proponents arguing that it's inherently more secure because a much larger set of developers can read the code, vet it and correct problems.

Yoggie Security Systems has today released the source code for its Linux-based mini-security computers to the developer community, and aims to release the source code to most of the applications on the Yoggie Gatekeeper system in due course.