Open source code is everywhere in the enterprise; it’s estimated that upwards of 90% of Fortune 500 companies have it in their software supply chains. But open source code is notoriously rife with vulnerabilities, and identifying and patching those bugs can be an endless battle for security teams.
IBM and Red Hat are betting that a new initiative, Project Lightwell, can help accelerate this process.
Announced today, the project will commit $5 billion and 20,000 IBM and Red Hat engineers to build a new ‘enterprise clearinghouse’ to accelerate discovery and remediation of vulnerabilities in open source software. The companies say the clearinghouse will serve as an AI-powered “security coordination layer,” giving enterprises the ability to integrate patches directly into their existing software supply chains.
Now in the design phase with a group of 11 financial partners, Project Lightwell will eventually be offered as a commercial subscription.
“The advancement in AI tools has broken the patching map, which is the ability to discover vulnerabilities in software without losing the speed of remediation,” Ashesh Badani, Red Hat SVP and CPO, told CSOonline. “Everyone’s running open source software, and the challenge is not being able to fix vulnerabilities quickly enough.”
