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The Linux Foundation said on Thursday that they are starting a new project to fix flaws in open source software (OSS) more effectively. Akrites sets up a shared Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) to work together on finding, fixing, and sharing OSS security problems.
If it sounds familiar, it should. Less than two weeks ago, Chainguard announced Athena, a coalition of over two dozen fintech and technology organizations aimed at addressing OSS bugs before public disclosure.
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Chainguard said it would team up with the Linux Foundation on a SIRT. They pointed out that more AI in cyberattacks is making it harder to share info and fix problems quickly.
The Linux Foundation’s new announcement does not talk about Athena, but Akrites does the same thing: it provides tools and ways to report, check, and fix OSS problems before they are publicly shared.
Akrites has help from many companies like Anthropic, AWS, Chainguard, Cisco, Citi, Endor Labs, Ericsson, Google, IBM, JPMorganChase, Microsoft, GitHub, NVIDIA, OpenAI, RapidFort, Red Hat, Rust Foundation, Sonatype, Vodafone, and Zscaler. Many of these are also part of Athena.
Seed money for Akrites comes from the Linux Foundation’s Alpha-Omega fund. Other groups provide engineering help and more money.
Akrites will create a trusted partner for reporting flaws. This will stop many scattered reports. They will also help key systems fix issues before they get attacked.
“When patches are released to the public, adversaries are able to utilize AI to rapidly reverse engineer the underlying vulnerabilities, develop exploits, and launch attacks. The success of our efforts, therefore, will be measured in patch deployment, not publication,” the Linux Foundation said.
Akrites was made to keep things private, to stop bad actors from creating weapons from weaknesses before fixes are ready, and to help as a final option, making sure that updates can still be given for software that is not supported anymore.
