Audit of TrueCrypt disk encryption software reveals low source code quality

by
in security on (#3HZ)
Back in October 2013, Kenneth White and Matthew Green kicked off the idea to do a full and complete audit of TrueCrypt, the most popular disk encryption package out there. They raised over $60,000 dollars and 33BTC to this end, and got underway.
The first part of the audit - the in-depth source code review - was performed by a security firm and completed on April 14 of this year ( report ).
The results are interesting to read. No bogeys have been found so far, though 11 medium-to-minor items were identified. But the authors did note:
Overall, the source code for both the bootloader and the Windows kernel driver did not meet expected standards for secure code. This includes issues such as lack of comments, use of inse-cure or deprecated functions, inconsistent variable types, and so forth.

The next stage, cryptanalysis , has begun and is proceeding.
I'm sure plenty of people are thinking, "How about doing the same thing for OpenSSL?" I'd personally prefer to see this sort of effort going into improving the OpenSSL software.

OpenBSD team is looking at OpenSSL (Score: 4, Interesting)

by zocalo@pipedot.org on 2014-04-16 13:27 (#13E)

It's long overdue for an independant audit, IMHO, but the OpenSSL code is now getting a review and code clean up by the OpenBSD team and they certainly know their stuff. Whether the results and reporting on their findings will be as in-depth as the TrueCrypt audit remains to be seen, but it's still infinitely better than nothing. Really this ought to be the kind of the thing that the various FL/OSS projects should be pushing for from their commercial users as well as contributions to the code base itself. No in-house devs to help with contributions to the code, fine, then how about contributing some funds for an independant code audit instead? Help us make your systems more secure!
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