Several bloggers have already reported on the Open Source Security Study released by Fortify’s Security Research Group (and Larry Suto), but we are yet to see anyone take an in-depht look at the study itself. This is our attempt to take a closer look at the study titled “How Are Open Source Development Communities Embracing Security Best Practices?”. The study which was released as an 11-page report, is free to download from the company’s website.

We’ll analyze some of the statements and conclusions made in the report, and also look at a couple of the “Open Source Development Communities” that the study surveyed.

If you want to undertake a study of a certain group of applications, and given the sweeping and misleading conclusions that the report reached, I think it makes sense to make a comparative study of their closed source equivalents. But, no, Fortify chose to exclude “Freeware projects that are not open source”. And for the open source applications that they studied (see the list above), Fortify found that “few open source projects provide” access to security resources, which the study identified as:

TayKrOn Games, a developer of video games, has announced the release of a demo of Space Bugs for the Android SO. Two versions, for Android SO experts (only the .apk) and the “Ready to Run” version with the SDK and .bat files, are available.

MonolithAndroid has been updated to version 1.0.2 alpha. This release has a few bug releases and some graphical improvements:

Corrected a bug in monolith mode that resulted in incorrect display of the cells when evolution began
Improved status font rendering
Added a backdrop (moon tycho crater)
Changed the color of monolith blocks to white
Improved U shaped playfield rendering

Herocraft, a games maker based in Kaliningrad, Russia, has been porting some of its games to the Android platform. Although no full working game has been made available, they have provided screen shots and a YouTube video.

MonolithAndroid is a block game for the Android platform. At present it has two game modes. Classic mode looks and plays like the classic game tetris. Monolith fuses tetris gameplay with Conway’s game of life. So when the player completes a line that has a black block in it, the game grid evolves following the [...]

Tasos Kleisas has updated Monolithandroid, a 3D Tetris-like Game for Android. Released under the Apache License 2.0, Monolithandroid uses openGL ES for graphics rendering and, in addition to the classic tetris game mode, comes with two additional game modes - Dizzy and Monolith.

WiFi Army is a real life first player shooter game for Android. It is being developed by W2Pi Studio, a subsidiary of W2Pi Entertainment. Peter Whatanitch, President of W2Pi Entertainment, and lead game developer of Wifi Army has had an introductory video of Wifi Army on YouTube, which is been made available for [...]