Lamp open-source stack beats rivals for security

Code analysis firm Coverity has assessed the quality of leading open-source software projects, and concluded that the widely used Lamp stack of technologies outperforms most other programs.

As part of a research contract for the US Department of Homeland Security, Coverity analysed over 17.5 million lines of source code. It discovered that the foundations of the Lamp stack – Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python – compared well to other open-source programs. The stack had an average of 0.290 defects per thousand lines of code – significantly lower that the overall average of 0.434 for the 32 projects analysed.

Coverity’s research was carried out as part of a three-year contract with the Department of Homeland Security, called the Vulnerability Discovery and Remediation Open Source Hardening Project. It is intended to offer a “baseline” for comparisons between various types of software.

Supporters of the project say it could improve software quality by automating analysis and testing.

“Coverity's static source code analysis has proven to be an effective step towards furthering the quality and security of Linux," said Andrew Morton, head maintainer of the 2.6 Linux kernel. "I welcome further contributions from Coverity to help identify defects in the Linux kernel with unprecedented speed and scalability."