Open-Source: Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil, See No Evil
Open-Source: Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil, See No Evil
Table of contents:-
The three wise monkeys have been quietly watching over Japanese folklore for centuries, each one minding a different sense, each one a small lesson in restraint. Borrow that image for a moment and place it inside a server room, a BSD jail, or a Linux kernel mailing list, and something rather fitting happens. Open-source software has built its own version of those three monkeys, except here, seeing, hearing, and speaking are not about looking away from trouble. They are about looking straight at it, listening for it constantly, and never staying quiet when it turns up. Transparency, monitoring, and disclosure are the three senses that keep open ecosystems honest, and together they form one of the most distinctive strengths of free and open-source software (FOSS), whether you are running FreeBSD on a home server, a Debian fleet in a data centre, or an independent distro on a single laptop.
This matters more than ever. Open-source code now sits inside almost everything, from mobile operating systems to industrial control systems, and the more ubiquitous it becomes, the more attractive a target it is. The good news is that the open-source world has spent decades building the very tools and norms that make it harder for problems to stay hidden. This article looks at how seeing, hearing, and speaking work in practice across the open-source landscape, and why every user, from a curious hobbyist to a large enterprise, benefits from understanding them.
See No Evil
Seeing, in the open-source sense, means visibility into what code actually contains and how trustworthy its practices are. Because the source is public, anyone can, in principle, read it. In practice, very few people read every line of every dependency, so the community has built automated eyes to do much of that watching instead.
One widely used example is the OpenSSF Scorecard, a project from the Open Source Security Foundation that runs automated checks against a repository covering things like branch protection, dependency updates, and signed releases, then produces a score that helps a team decide whether to trust a piece of code. Launched in November 2020, it was created to auto-generate a security score for open source projects, helping users decide on the trust, risk, and security posture for their use case. It does not replace a proper audit, but it gives a fast, repeatable snapshot of a project's hygiene, and it is freely available for anyone to run against the open-source components they depend on.
Visibility also extends to knowing exactly what is inside a piece of software in the first place, which is where the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) comes in. CISA describes an SBOM as a nested inventory, a list of ingredients that make up software components, and considers it a key building block in software security and supply chain risk management. Two open formats dominate this space: SPDX, developed by the Linux Foundation, and CycloneDX. SPDX has gained widespread adoption across the open source ecosystem and commercial software vendors, and supports cryptographic package verification across formats including JSON, RDF, XML, and YAML. For anyone running independent distributions or maintaining their own builds, generating an SBOM with tools such as Syft or Trivy turns a vague sense of "it's probably fine" into a concrete, checkable list of every library and version in use, ready to be cross-referenced against vulnerability databases the moment something new is disclosed.
Hear No Evil
Seeing what is inside your software is only half the story. Hearing is about noticing when something is actually happening on your network or your host right now, and open source has produced some of the most respected listening tools in the entire security industry.
On the network side, Snort and Suricata remain the two names every systems administrator eventually meets. Snort is an open-source, free, and lightweight network intrusion detection system for Linux and Windows, designed to detect emerging threats through real-time traffic analysis and packet logging. Suricata, developed by the Open Information Security Foundation, took a newer architectural approach. It is described by its own project as high-performance, open-source network analysis and threat detection software used by private and public organisations worldwide, and embedded by major vendors to protect their assets. Suricata's multi-threaded design lets it use every available CPU core, in contrast to Snort's traditionally single-threaded engine, and it can log far richer details about a connection, including TLS certificates and extracted files, not just raw alerts.
Listening does not stop at the network edge. Host-based tools such as Wazuh, which grew out of the older OSSEC project, watch what happens inside a machine itself: file changes, log entries, configuration drift, and login attempts. Wazuh routinely pulls in alerts generated by Suricata or Snort and correlates them centrally, giving a single place to see both the network's ears and the host's ears working together. The Wazuh server sits at the heart of the system, collecting data from agents and processing it using decoders, rules, and threat intelligence to detect known indicators of compromise, while the dashboard provides pre-built views for threat hunting and regulatory compliance such as PCI DSS, GDPR, and NIST 800-53. None of this requires a commercial licence. A determined private user with a spare machine and a weekend can set up the same class of monitoring that protects far larger networks, which is precisely the democratising effect open source is known for.
Speak No Evil
The final sense, speaking, is arguably the most human element of the three. Finding a flaw is one thing; saying something about it, to the right person, in the right way, and at the right time, is what actually fixes it. Open source has built formal, global infrastructure for exactly this kind of speech.
At the centre of that infrastructure sits the CVE Program, the common language the entire security world uses to talk about a specific flaw without confusion. The CVE Program has grown from a single organisation assigning identifiers into a global network of over 300 CVE Numbering Authorities across more than 40 countries, including vendor organisations, open source projects, CERT organisations, and bug bounty providers. For vulnerabilities in open source projects specifically, many major projects now operate their own CNAs, including the Apache Software Foundation, the Linux kernel security team, and the Python Software Foundation, which lets the people closest to the code make the call on what counts as a genuine security issue rather than leaving that judgement entirely to outsiders.
Knowing where to send a report matters just as much as the identifier itself, and this is where RFC 9116 quietly solved a problem that had bothered researchers for years. Published in April 2022, it defines a machine-parsable format called security.txt to help organisations describe their vulnerability disclosure practices, making it easier for researchers to report vulnerabilities they find. The file is placed at a known location under a domain's well-known path, and it can list contact details, an encryption key, a disclosure policy, and an acknowledgements page for researchers who reported issues responsibly. It is a small text file, but it replaces years of guesswork and unanswered emails with a clear, standard channel, and its adoption by organisations large and small, including several major technology firms, shows how a simple open standard can change behaviour across an entire industry. The practice it supports, coordinated vulnerability disclosure, gives maintainers time to build and ship a fix before full technical details become public, balancing the researcher's right to be heard against the wider community's need not to be handed a ready-made exploit.
Together, seeing, hearing, and speaking form a continuous loop rather than three separate disciplines. A scorecard or SBOM reveals a weak dependency, a monitoring tool flags suspicious behaviour tied to that same component, and a CVE report or security.txt submission turns the discovery into a fix that everyone downstream can apply. None of the three works particularly well alone, but together they are a large part of why open-source software, despite running so much of the world's critical infrastructure, has earned the trust it holds today.
In short, the wisdom of those three old monkeys gets turned on its head in the open-source world. Here, seeing, hearing, and speaking openly about evil, rather than avoiding it, is exactly the discipline that keeps software, networks, and the people who depend on them safer.
Disclaimer: All product names, logos, and trademarks mentioned in this article, including but not limited to Snort, Suricata, Wazuh, OSSEC, OpenSSF, CVE, MITRE, CISA, SPDX, and the Linux Foundation, are the property of their respective owners and are referenced here solely for educational and informational purposes. The Distrowrite Project has made every reasonable effort to ensure the accuracy of the information presented, drawing only on official and authoritative sources at the time of writing. This article does not endorse, promote, or provide guidance for any activity involving malware, viruses, unauthorised intrusion, or any other action that could compromise the integrity, confidentiality, or availability of networks, devices, or infrastructure. Tools and standards described here are intended exclusively for lawful, defensive, and educational use.
References:-
RFC 9116: A File Format to Aid in Security Vulnerability Disclosure, IETF
RFC 9116 - A File Format to Aid in Security Vulnerability Disclosure
Network IDS integration - Proof of Concept guide · Wazuh documentation
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