InfoWorld's top picks among open source tools for managing and securing networks, computers, and mobile devices
The best open source networking and security software
Don’t trust that Wi-Fi hotspot? Open source has you covered. Don’t trust the government? Open source has you covered there too. Our Bossie winners include a number of neat mobile apps that provide secure communications (end-to-end encrypted phone calls and text messaging) and allow you to browse the Web and send email without a trace. You’ll also find top tools for managing passwords, creating VPNs, deploying network services, and troubleshooting those services when things go wrong.
Onion Browser
Whereas FoxyProxy offers an iPhone VPN, Onion Browser kicks it up a notch and offers a true Tor experience from your iOS device, masking your browsing habits by sending your data around the world. Supporting Tor 0.2.4.14-alpha, Onion Browser creates an encrypted tunnel for your browsing session and obfuscates your phone’s IP address. The handy New Identity button clears cache, history, and cookies and requests a new IP address in one step. Onion Browser also offers fallback search engines should DuckDuckGo.com (search engine sans tracking) go down. Downsides to surfing the DarkNet? Your surfing may be a bit slower.
— Victor R. Garza
OpenVPN
One of the simplest ways to secure private or personal information is simply not to use open Wi-Fi hotspots. If you must, then use a VPN. OpenVPN can create secure point-to-point or site-to-site connections for users and remote access locations; it works though proxy servers, NAT, and firewalls as well. OpenVPN clients are available for the major operating systems including iOS and Android.
OpenVPN can use either TCP or UDP, bypassing some common VPN roadblocks, and it supports hardware-based acceleration to improve performance. Authentication can be handled via preshared keys, certificates, or user name and password combination. SQL and LDAP database authentication can be accomplished with third-party plug-ins. Best of all, it’s easy to roll your own OpenVPN VPN.
— Victor R. Garza
@SSP
The Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy (@SSP) works in tandem with your SMTP server to provide encrypted transport, antispam measures, and virus scanning with almost no configuration required on your primary mail server. Although @SSP supports almost every form of spam filtering, it can be configured to use only the filtering methods you want.
@SSP automatically whitelists addresses to which you send emails, so your contacts do not get accidentally blocked. It uses a “redlist” to prevent certain addresses from being added to the whitelist. Special addresses can be used as spam honeypots to help add to your spam database. You can use custom regular expressions to identify spam, and you can alter message headers or subject lines based on spam rating.
— High Mobley
Zentyal Server
Zentyal Server is a Linux distribution with a helpful configuration interface that makes it easy to set up a full-featured small-business server. Zentyal is the glue that holds together a wide variety of open source software and makes it all manageable.
The distro includes server software for email; IM; VoIP; LDAP and RADIUS; file and print sharing; Active Directory; backups; Web and FTP; and shared calendar, tasks, and contacts. It can also sync with mobile devices. For networking services, Zentyal provides NAT routing, firewalling, QoS, DNS, DHCP, NTP (Network Time Protocol), VPN, intrusion detection, caching, Web proxying, and a captive portal system.
— High Mobley
Elastix
Elastix is a CentOS-based distro with Asterisk and associated PBX and UC (Unified Communication) software preinstalled and well integrated. It includes a Web GUI for easy configuration of the Asterisk server and all of its extensions and components.
Elastix adds support for faxing, video phones, follow-me, UC integration of mobile phones and headsets via Bluetooth, extensive IM features, calendar and address book, LDAP integration, call recording, and pre-canned PBX reporting.
An additional module can help run a call center, including support for callback. Need high availability? The Elastix wiki has a how-to for setting up clustered Elastix servers to provide fail-over support.
— High Mobley
