Truth be told, security as an industry is forever indebted to open source ecosystem. This includes all the contributors who contribute to open-source projects and the organizations who choose to make their projects open source. Be it ModSecurity – protecting millions of websites and forming the basis for tons of security products, or VLC media player that chose to stay open source despite receiving all kinds of offers (the creators were in their twenties when they stood their ground and chose not to sell out or put user data at stake).
At Astra Security, we believe that open source contributors are the true revolutionaries of the internet world. They do not wait for someone to fund a project or even gather enough demand before starting. They see a problem and start fixing it by writing code. If someone else has already started a project they’re more than happy to contribute. Pure honesty.
Astra Security Suite was started after talking to dozens of CTOs, CISOs, and CXOs who were security conscious but always complaint about the usability of security products, false positives, and bad UX. We wanted to solve this problem and make security completely plug & play for everyone – tech and non-tech people both! When we got started with our tech planning, we were hit with a dilemma whether we should build a firewall from scratch or build it on top of a known & trusted project.
We chose not to re-invent the wheel and used an excellent open-source project named PHP-IDS instead. PHP-IDS was started by two open-source lovers years ago. We took their permission and started to evolve the project. And that’s how our love for open source began!
Over the years, Astra has evolved into a full security suite having a rock-solid firewall, malware scanner, and dozens of other features making security easy to use. But all this started with the head start we got from the open source project we used.
Similarly, our association with open source has also strengthened. When we were building a solution to prevent shell uploads/malware uploads on websites – we discovered PHPMussel, an excellent project that solved this problem. We decided to use the project and eventually ended up supporting it after talking to one of the PHPMussel’s amazing developer Caleb Mazalevskis.
Update: PHPMussel version 3.0 is out now!
Our plans with OpenSource going forward:
- We plan to continue supporting open source projects in every possible way we can. Be it time, code contribution or financial.
- Every time we have spoken to open source contributors developing security projects, we’ve felt a sense of brotherhood and common purpose. We will continue finding ways to further deepen that bond with more such projects.
- We’ll keep contributing to open source projects. Over the next few months, we will be making some of our open source projects more accessible so that others can benefit from it, as we did when we first started.
Hello,
Great write up…Astra Team.
This is very informative and helpful tips.
Thanks a ton.