Buying Security: Open Source Software Funding and Security Posture

By: Sara Ann Brackett and Stewart Scott with Christina Cheng | Fall 2025

High-profile open source software (OSS) incidents, such as the disclosure of critical vulnerabilities within the widely used Java-based log4j framework, have become more prominent in cybersecurity policy discussions, prompting calls for enhanced security of the OSS ecosystem. The 2021 log4j incident, similar in scope and severity to the 2014 Heartbleed vulnerability, led to widespread alerts, White House meetings, legislative proposals, non-profit funding initiatives, and industry consortia. Both events emphasized what had long been known to cybersecurity practitioners, OSS advocates, and community members: OSS’s criticality to modern digital systems remains foundational, underappreciated outside of insular technical circles, and largely without sufficient support. Since those incidents, recent near misses such as the XZ Utils compromise, as well as continuous attacks on package managers such as recent malicious backdoors targeting the Node.js package manager npm, have underlined that viewpoint, alongside policy initiatives designed to support the ecosystem. Policy efforts in the United States focusing on OSS to date include funding and security investments, government working groups, and expanded partnerships. For example, in the past few years, the US government announced a series of initiatives focused the OSS ecosystem, including the Open Source Software Security Initiative (OS3I) inter-agency working group and an $11 million investment in the security of OSS. In tandem, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, published its Open Source Software Security Roadmap, an effort to harden the OSS ecosystem through government engagement and support as well as industry participation that cited log4j as a driving example.

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