Open Source Security & Privacy Apps for Small Business

We looked at some excellent open source security applications for small businesses in our article, 5 Open Source Security Tools for Small Business. This roundup includes more open source tools to protect your online privacy, evade snoops and censors, protect your passwords, and protect your data.

TheHeartbleed bugin OpenSSL was alarming, but does it mean that open source software is unreliable? A single incident hardly constitutes an indictment of a huge and diverse software ecosystem. In the open source world, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" is a cherished belief. It means that open code is stronger because anyone can examine the code and find and fix flaws. Security expert Bruce Schneier, inSecrecy, Security, and Obscurity, explains how the open source development model produces stronger code.

How did a serious bug in an essential technology go undetected for more than two years? The short answer: cryptography is very difficult to implement correctly, and OpenSSL was maintained by overworked and underfunded developers. Open source worked as intended because, once discovered, the flaw was publicly announced and a fix quickly released. In addition, theLinux Foundation is allocating funds and developersto OpenSSL. While nothing is ever 100 percent certain, open source has a long record of reliability.

If you spend any amount of time online you have an unwieldy number of logins and passwords to manage.KeePassis a super-nice, free password creator, manager and encrypted locker that stores your logins securely. You only need to remember a single master password. For extra-strong security you can also secure it with an encryption key. KeePass runs on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. There are also portable versions that run from a USB stick, and mobile versions for Android, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, and Windows Phone 7.

Figure 1: KeePass, an open source encrypted password locker.

Online security is very difficult, because the Internet was not designed for security and secrecy. Powerful commercial and government interests invest enormous resources into poking their noses into every nook and cranny of our online activities. You'll find a number of open source tools to protect you from online snoops and censors, such as Tor (a.k.a., the onion router), and strong encryption for documents and your online sessions.

Invented by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Tor protects online communications. It routes your Internet travels through a twisty global network of encrypted routers to foil traffic analysis, and to get around online censors. Anyone with access to the wires, routers, or servers that your traffic passes through can eavesdrop with trivial ease, unless you foil them by encrypting your Internet communications.

Figure 2: Tails can look like Windows XP operating system.

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Open Source Security & Privacy Apps for Small Business