An Overview of Cyber Security Funding for Open Source Software

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 8 Dec 2024 (v1), last revised 15 May 2026 (this version, v3)] An Overview of Cyber Security Funding for Open Source Software Jukka Ruohonen, Gaurav Choudhary, Adam Alami Many open source software (OSS) projects need more human resources for maintenance, improvements, and sometimes even their survival. These needs allegedly apply even to vital OSS projects that can be seen as being a part of the world's critical infrastructures. To address this resourcing problem, new funding instruments for OSS projects have been established in recent years. The paper examines two such funding bodies for OSS and the projects they have funded. The focus of both funding bodies is on software security and cyber security in general. Based on qualitative thematic analysis, the results indicate that particularly OSS supply chains, network and cryptography libraries, programming languages, and operating systems and their low-level components have been funded and thus seen as critical in terms of cyber security. In addition to the qualitative results presented, the paper makes a contribution by connecting the research branches of critical infrastructure and sustainability of OSS projects. A further contribution is made by connecting the topic examined to recent cyber security regulations. Finally, an important argument is raised that neither cyber security nor project sustainability alone can entirely explain the rationales behind the funding decisions made by the two funding bodies. Comments: Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Engineering and Cybersecurity of Critical Systems (EnCyCriS 2026), Rio de Janeiro, ACM, pp. 18-25 Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Software Engineering (cs.SE) Cite as: arXiv:2412.05887 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2412.05887v3 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2412.05887 Focus to learn more Related DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3786160.3788466 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Jukka Ruohonen [view email] [v1] Sun, 8 Dec 2024 10:48:30 UTC (42 KB) [v2] Tue, 29 Apr 2025 06:43:22 UTC (157 KB) [v3] Fri, 15 May 2026 11:45:48 UTC (60 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2024-12 Change to browse by: cs cs.CY cs.SE References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)