The year 2008 was an exciting year to me. The biggest thing going on the infosec side was the formation of the Open Infosec Foundation. We’ve been working on it behind the scenes for more than a year now, and it’s cool that we’ve finally announced our plans. Of course, the work is just getting started. Next year, we expect to finalize our foundation setup. We’re working with the Software Freedom Law Center for setting up the foundation charter and consortium rules. While the US government is funding us initially, we hope the consortium will guarantee our long term funding. We are talking to some interesting companies already, both big and small.

The last year I’ve been working on a prototype of the engine we’re building as well. It’s private for now as the foundation licensing terms & conditions haven’t been determined yet. I’m writing it mostly to learn. While I’ve been working as a developer on the Snort_inline project for a number of years already and as a contractor on several Snort related projects, I never learned so much about IDS/IPS technology as I’m doing now. The prototype may or may not be used (partly) for the engine once we got our feature list complete. We’ll see about that when the time is there. I plan to blog more about this codebase in the new year.

In 2008 we had our first brainstorming session, and to us it was very successful. In 2009 we’re hoping to do a few more. Stay tuned for the dates and places. I hope we can continue our feature discussions in the new year and give the foundation further shape. And don’t forget to suggest us a name for the engine… “OISF engine” just doesn’t sound cool enough! 😉