LAMP Stack Security Analysis Reveals Low Bug Density Findings

The most popular open-source software is also the most free of bugs, according to the first results of a U.S. government-sponsored effort to help make such software as secure as possible. The so-called LAMP stack of open-source software has a lower bug density--the number of bugs per thousand lines of code--than a baseline of 32 open-source projects analyzed, Coverity, a maker of code analysis tools, announced Monday.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security awarded US$1.24 million in funding to Stanford University, Coverity and Symantec to hunt for security bugs in open-source software and to improve Coverity's commercial tool for source code analysis. The funding, announced in January, is for a three-year "Open Source Hardening Project." LAMP includes the Linux operating system, Apache Web server, MySQL database and a scripting language--PHP, Perl or Python. It has been pushing its way into mainstream corporate computing, a rival to Java and Microsoft's .Net.

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