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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You don’t need to have access to the source code (reverse engineered or not) to find security holes. However, people need to audit the source code to prove it’s secure.

    So, closed source software is maybe slightly harder to find flaws in for a malicious actor, but significantly harder for users to audit (because you have to rely on the word of the company publishing the software, or a 3rd party security auditing company, or reverse engineer the code yourself)

    Additionally, it’s harder for malicious actors to hide the existence of vulnerabilities they find. They can’t just not tell anyone what they find because the code is all public anyway. If people are looking at it frequently enough (i.e. if the project is still active), someone else will probably notice it as well.