^ As if any amount of security clearance can erase human fallibility.

In any real security environment, humans are poison. Period, end of story. This is not an issue exclusive to open-source.

Of course not, but it's exacerbated by open source. Humans are indeed poison, which is why it's normal to involve as few humans as possible. Unfortunately AI is not sufficiently advanced so you still need some of them in order to get the job done.

This is a falsehood. One of many sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203211 (HN discussion of Snowden using wget to scrape NSA internal sites)

So security through obscurity?

Or maybe security through, you know, actual security.

Closed source does not mean obscurity–– and open source does not mean clarity (see OpenSSL, that one Linux 2.6 thing¹, etc).

It's not like being proprietary suddenly means the only security is through obscurity. Why do you think that? Are you just a zealot? Did you not consider that closed source software could be well-engineered and secure? You're welcome to read about some of the security features in Windows NT² (that article is a bit old but still relevant), which are considerably more thorough than (non-SE)Linux (I think SELinux has auditing now, so it's at least comparable to NT).

Now, don't get me wrong, I generally prefer open-source tools (for a variety of reasons) and tend to trust them more, but saying stupid stuff like you are just gives open source a bad name.

On top of that, obscurity is a perfectly valid layer of security. To use a mediocre analogy, of course you want your safe to be strong enough that nobody could break in even if it's in plain sight—but it's certainly not a bad idea to hide the safe as well.

¹ https://lwn.net/Articles/341773/

² https://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windowsnt/...

I wasn't saying it was only secure due to obscurity. I should asked more clearly - "So the idea is to enhance security through obscurity?" For mission critical secure systems, I can see a case being made that software should be closed source, as it allows fewer people to be aware of potential attack vectors. Especially, if you know the software you are creating won't be used externally much or audited.

So you trust the black boxes someone sold you?

The opposite of “open source” isn't “black box”.

Not the person you're replying to but opposite of open source is closed source, and isn't that basically a black box to you since you don't know what it's doing?

Is there something more subtle I'm missing?

Yes. Microsoft offers source access to Windows. IBM and Oracle will rent you people who know the details of their software. None of those companies' offerings are particularly ‘black box’-y, in spite of being very closed source.

‘Open source’ is more about the development model (and freedoms) than about the nature of ‘knowing what the software is doing’.

Heck, I could argue that Linux is a black box to most people who aren't well-versed in kernel development. OpenSSL is notoriously difficult to understand. Sometimes huge bugs look relatively innocent¹ even with people looking at the code.

¹ e.g. https://lwn.net/Articles/341773/

At the level of security where you need to be paranoid about the operating system developers, how do you know the source code Microsoft shows you, corresponds to the Windows binaries running on your machines? (Let alone to the sum and total of all binary patches applied thereto?)

A source license probably also gets you the build system, or if not maybe you could throw more money at them.

But reproducible builds are a hard problem, so… honestly, I can't answer that.

And that's what I really mean by 'black boxes'. Yes, you can buy access to, e.g., Windows source, but that doesn't mean that what you review and what is running on your systems are the same thing. And I can't even speak to all the third-party bits that get compiled in to an instance of Windows. It's a really, really hard problem.

Well, end of story. That's it then. No more discussion can be had!