Participants in a White House meeting on securing open-source software expressed optimism for working effectively with government to help prevent Log4j-like events.

Hoping to foster improved security of open-source software, the White House hosted a meeting last week with some of the largest public and private users and maintainers of open-source software. Widely used open-source software “brings unique value, and has unique security challenges, because of its breadth of use and the number of volunteers responsible for its ongoing security maintenance,” the White House said.

The meeting was organized in December, shortly after a dangerous vulnerability in the Java-based logging utility Log4j emerged. That easy-to-exploit flaw has the potential to compromise hundreds of millions of machines globally. The FBI, the NSA and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) quickly branded it as “a threat to organizations and governments everywhere.” In a letter inviting tech leaders to the meeting, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that “open-source software is a key national security concern.”

The meeting included attendees from a wide range of government departments and agencies, including the Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology Anne Neuberger, National Cyber Director Chris Inglis, and officials from the Office of the National Cyber Director, CISA, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Private sector participants included executives and top-level representatives from Akamai, Amazon, Apache Software Foundation, Apple, Cloudflare, Facebook (Meta), GitHub, Google, IBM, the Linux Foundation, OpenSSF, Microsoft, Oracle and RedHat.

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