The National Security Agency has recently joined the code-sharing site, GitHub, uploading many of their projects as open-source to share with programmers across the world. This is the latest step in the trend of the NSA, a usually secretive organization, opening itself up to society at large.
According to HackerNews, GitHub has seen 32 projects uploaded currently by the NSA to their site, as part of the NSA Technology Transfer Program (TTP), with more “coming soon,” according to a statement on the agency’s website:
The NSA Technology Transfer Program (TTP) works with agency innovators who wish to use this collaborative model for transferring their technology to the commercial marketplace… OSS invites the cooperative development of technology, encouraging broad use and adoption. The public benefits by adopting, enhancing, adapting or commercialising the software. The government benefits from the open source community’s enhancements to the technology.
Some of the projects released include CASA, a tool that identifies unexpected or prohibited authority certificates; Control Flow Integrity, which prevents exploitations by using the hardware itself; and OWF, a web application that creates lightweight widgets in a browser that can be accessed from one location. Other listed projects such as Security-Enhanced Linux, have been available online for a while.
However, programmers may be wary in working with any code provided by the NSA, given their recently exposed lack of security. According to a declassified document obtained under a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request by the New York Times, the NSA regularly left physical server stacks completely unsecured and open to tampering, did not use two-factor authentication in many of their digital systems and did not use access control lists to verify which users should have access to sensitive information.
The WannaCry ransomware cyber attack was also blamed on the NSA — Microsoft claimed that leaked NSA code allowed hackers to hold users’ data for some ransom, most notably shutting down parts of the British National Health Service. “The WannaCrypt exploits used in the attack were drawn from exploits stolen from the National Security Agency, or NSA, in the United States,” Microsoft wrote in an official blog post.
Jack Hadfield is a student at the University of Warwick and a regular contributor to Breitbart Tech. You can like his page on Facebook and follow him on Twitter @ToryBastard_ or on Gab @JH.
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