Open source — Government Service Design Manual

gov.uk

45 points·pythonist··12 comments

Even the manual is open-source https://github.com/alphagov/government-service-design-manual.

I suggested a comment on Saturday afternoon by Twitter, it was passed on via an @ mention, and I was told it would be updated Monday. This is government IT, but not as we know it.

How long until the entire .gov IT infrastructure gets owned because some civil servant decided to accept a pull request with an obvious backdoor?

Could you describe any plausible scenario in which one pull request could compromise the entire .gov IT infrastructure?

wow, where to begin?

Anywhere. Just one.

exec()

That's just code, not a scenario. Government IT systems are currently subject to oversight, testing, comprehensive threat risk assessments etc. Those controls don't disappear just because the software is open source. Right now it's not possible to just deploy new code, open source or not, into a production environment on a critical piece of infrastructure without review. If anything, the open source code should be significantly more secure, because you have added an additional layer of public review, testing and comment.

Let's hope you are right.. :)

The UK gov does not have the best record with IT projects.

If it's open source, the code will be visible and noticed. In a closed source environment, you could still have the exploit, but it'd be behind closed doors.

That is assuming the code is well scrutinized and how they manage contributions.

Wow, makes me proud to live in England. This is the way forward. Employees in most cases dont care whether they are given Windows or Linux as an OS.

It's been mentioned here before but worth pointing out again. The UK government has an official github account: https://github.com/alphagov

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