Experts Believe Open Source is More Secure for Health Sector

One of the reasons is that security is thought of as weaker in OSS than proprietary software. However research at the University of Warwick’s Institute for Digital Healthcare and the Centre for Health Informatics and Multiprofessional Education at UCL Medical School has found that OSS is in fact more secure than the expensive alternatives.

The research supposedly shows that while one of the weaknesses of OSS is thought to be the public access to codes, this does not in fact make it any less safe than proprietary software, and can mean that it is stronger in many cases. “Critics of Open Source often argue that, because the code is public, an attacker can more easily find and exploit vulnerabilities,” said Professor Jeremy Wyatt at the University of Warwick.

“But our work at the University of Warwick and UCL shows that the evidence does not bear this out and in fact OSS may be more secure than other systems.”