31.Lock DigitalRoom

“A CII Best Practices badge, especially a gold badge, shows that an OSS project has implemented a large number of good practices to keep the project sustainable, counter vulnerabilities from entering their software, and address vulnerabilities when found.” – David A. Wheeler, Director of Open Source Supply Chain Security

Open source software (OSS) is now widely used by many organizations. But with that popularity, that means the security of OSS is now more important than ever. The CII Best Practices badge project — including its top-ranked “gold” badge — helps improve that security.

In June 2020, two different projects managed to earn a gold badge: the Linux kernel and curl. Both are widely depended on, and yet in many other ways, they are radically different. The Linux kernel has a large number of developers, and as a kernel, it must directly interact with a variety of hardware. Curl has a far smaller set of developers and is a user-level application. They join other projects with gold badges, including the Zephyr kernel and the CII Best Practices badge application itself. Such radically different projects managed to earn a gold badge and thus demonstrated their commitment to security. It also shows that these criteria can be applied even to such fundamentally different programs.