The question of code quality is always a difficult one, since in FOSS it’s public and often found lacking, but in private source you may never know. In these cases I rely on the vendor’s public statements about their development processes and certifications (e.g., ICSA). Commercial products often disclose their development processes and even run in-house security threat research groups that publish to the community.
There are also outside certifications. For example, www.icsalabs.com<http://www.icsalabs.com> lists certifications by vendor for those that have passed their test regimen, and both Dell SonicWall and Fortinet Fortigate are shown to be current. PFSense isn’t listed, and although it is theoretically vetted by many users, there is no guarantee of recency or thoroughness of the test regimen. This brings up the question of whether PFSense can meet regulatory requirements such as PCI, HIPAA, GLBA and SOX. While these regulatory organizations don’t require specific overall firewall certifications, they do require various specific standards, such as encryption strength, logging, VPN timeouts, etc. I don’t know if PFsense meets these requirements, as they don’t say so on their site. Companies like Dell publish white papers on their compliance with each regulatory organization. -mel On May 6, 2016, at 11:05 AM, Aris Lambrianidis <effulge...@gmail.com<mailto:effulge...@gmail.com>> wrote: amuse wrote: One question I have is: Is there any reason to believe that the source code for Sonicwall, Cisco, etc are any better than the PFSense code? Or are we just able to see the PFSense code and make unfounded assumptions that the commercial code is in better shape? Perhaps not. In fact, probably not, judging by the apparent lack of audit processes for say, OpenSSL libraries re-used in commercial products. It still doesn't detract from the value of what people are aware of, in this case, pfSense code quality. Aris
