Will Roper, assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics at the U.S. Air Force and a 2020 Wash100 Award winner, said the service plans to publish on open source platforms some of its code to generate more insights from the cybersecurity community, FedScoop reported Tuesday.
He said he also expects the Air Force to reassess how it classifies and develops applications to facilitate collaboration with white hat hackers and accommodate bug bounties.
“If a hacker in a foreign nation is able to take our system down in a few hours of conflict then I would be hard-pressed to say that by classifying our systems we did our warfighters the service that they deserve,” Roper said in a virtual press call Friday. “There is a way to have a hybrid model.”
Under the hybrid model, initial software and designs at the conceptual level could be shared with others to address and reduce vulnerabilities as the systems mature into operational platforms.
