Kaspersky Lab to hand over check of source code to global academics

MOSCOW, Apr 18 (PRIME) -- Russia’s Kaspersky Lab will entrust the check of a source code of its products to large international universities under the company’s global initiative on information openness in 2019, the anti-virus software maker’s Vice President for Public Affairs Anton Shingarev told PRIME on Thursday.

“The life has proved that it’s difficult to audit a source code fully. It needs significant resources, time. This is why we’re working on a unit that could audit the source code in a crowdsourcing regime with the help of universities and scientific centers of the level of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),” Shingarev said.

“We’re ready to give them the code for a check as a scientific and academic assignment in the information security industry. We want to design a system where several entities would scrutinize and re-scrutinize one after another the source code, so that the system would be international. It will improve transparency of our work even more.”

Kaspersky Lab intends to engage five institutions from Europe and Asia and already has a preliminary consent of a U.S. entity, but U.S. universities are out of the question because of a turbulent geopolitical situation, the executive said.

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