NSA posts sysadmin and security tools on GitHub

The American NSA has put a collection of tools online that it claims have been developed by the organization itself. The NSA does this in the context of the so-called Technology Transfer Program, which should enable commercial development, among other things.

By publishing the source code, the NSA hopes that the software will be used and modified, which should in turn lead to benefits for the US government. The tools are divided into software from the NSA and the Information Assurance department. The NSA’s GitHub page currently lists about thirty tools for various uses.

For example, there is the so-called GoSecure software, which makes it possible to set up a VPN server on a Raspberry Pi 3. It fulfills the role of the client, while the server itself can run on another system. In addition, there are tools for monitoring digital Windows certificates, a framework for software-defined radio and for analyzing code.

The NSA has contributed to open software before, for example through the development of SELinux and Accumulo and NiFi for Apache. For example, SELinux is part of several Linux distributions and lets users set access permissions through mandatory access controls.