Sardonix has conceded that the project has largely been a failure, putting open-source security auditing back on the drawing board.

The Sardonix project was born from the successes and eventual failure of the Linux Security Auditing Project (LSAP). Through it's design Sardonix encouraged the use of an OpenBSD-style software auditing process. This process involves researchers auditing software packages on a file-by-file basis. The purpose of the audit is to look for and locate basic programming errors that may or may not have software security implications. When the audit by one researcher has been completed, the next researcher initiates an audit of the software using the same process.

Sardonix's innovation was to create a hall of fame for security researchers, acting as a long-lasting and credible forum from which members could prove that they do in fact possess security auditing skills. The proof would come in the form of a rating system that gives the auditor a higher rating if subsequent audits proved he or she located all the bugs in the code reviewed, and gives the auditor a lower rating if other audits located bugs the researcher had overlooked.

By Hal Flynn at SecurityFocus.

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