Aeva Black soundbite (00:01)
The burden of securing open source — its ongoing maintenance, its testing, quality assurance, getting signing — to make open source continue to be deserving of the trust we’ve all placed in it that can’t rest solely on unfunded volunteers. Companies have to participate, shoulder up and help.
Omkhar Arasaratnam (00:19)
Welcome to What’s in the SOSS? I’m your host Omkhar Arasaratnam. I am the general manager of the OpenSSF. And today we have my good friend Aeva Black joining us. Hi Aeva!
Aeva Black (00:32)
Hi, Omkhar, thanks so much for having me on today.
Omkhar Arasaratnam (00:34)
It’s a pleasure. Now, to start things off, why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about your title and what you do?
Aeva Black (00:43)
Sure. So my official title is Section Chief for Open Source Security. Sounds kind of anime. I like it. I’m also a technical advisor here at CISA, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. We’re so enthusiastic about security, put it in our name twice. What I do day to day is just kind of work on solving open source security problems that I have been working on before, but now on this end of the fence.
Omkhar Arasaratnam (01:10)
Well, as I think I’ve told you in the past, my son is a huge anime fan. I literally had to bring a check bag back with me from Tokyo with all the various paraphernalia. But aside from indulging in my excitement about hearing CISA titles associated with anime, can you tell us a little bit more about the day-to-day? I mean, Section Chief sounds like a pretty cool role and you have been involved in the community for a while. What’s your day to day look like Aeva?
Aeva Black (01:37)
Honestly, you know, my previous careers, I often wrote code these days. Day-to-day looks more like answering emails, hopping on meetings, whether they’re internal meetings or interagency meetings, meetings with the open source communityies, but it’s a lot of talking and writing and speaking in public.
Omkhar Arasaratnam
When you announced new role at CISA and that you’d be joining CISA — I think it was late last summer, I think about August, if memory serves — I was incredibly excited because I’ve seen CISA over the years take a stronger, better, more supportive approach when it comes to open source software. And I was really excited to see somebody like you that has had such a long history of open source support and advocacy join CISA. Can you talk to me about what it looks like on the inside, as everybody’s sitting back with their developer keyboard, clickety clacking, doing git commits all day? Has, has the government evolved into pure open source? How’s that going?
Aeva Black (02:38)
You and our listeners might be surprised to realize just how much both federal and state governments have always used open source. Our, our friend Deb Bryant — she’s been around, used to be at Red Hat, helped out in the open source initiative — used to actually run the open source programs office for the state of Oregon more than 10 years ago. So I think what it looks like today in CISA is pretty much what it has looked like. There’s more clearance, there’s more coverage, should we say, for folks who want to contribute to open source as part of their day job.
We’ve seen that get written down in sort of a guidance way, both in the DoD CIO’s memo a couple years ago, the DHS CIO memo for all DHS agencies includes groups like Coast Guard to use more open source, to contribute to open source, to be good participants in the community. So we’re seeing certainly more support for that. But again, folks across government have always used open sourcing. My first moment of realizing that, probably 2008, I saw some folks from the US Navy give a talk on using MySQL in a cluster running in their ships for battlefield awareness. It was the best database they could find at the time for what they needed. So it’s really nothing new.
Omkhar Arasaratnam (04:00)
Thanks for letting us know. I hadn’t realized that. And it’s very encouraging to hear that not only are we seeing broad adoption of open source within private sector, but also within the public sector. Now, security is a really important mission with a near infinite problem space, especially when it comes to open source security. You’ve been doing this for a while, where should we start? Because it seems like we could start just about anywhere and still have a life’s work ahead of us.
Aeva Black (04:27)
Yeah. Like you said, I’ve been doing this a while since the late 90s, and really as part of my job since the early 2000s. What hasn’t changed: the breadth and the diversity of open source communities is our strength, it is global participation in these communities. And so for today, in light of some of the recent threats against open source, and the pretty big compromises or vulnerabilities in open source that have affected products, we still need to recognize that open source is maintained mostly by volunteers in a participatory community-driven approach.
And yes, of course, companies have a big role to play too. But money isn’t always the solution, but research and common sense have shown that it usually is part of the solution. The burden of securing open source, its ongoing maintenance, its testing, quality assurance, getting signing all of those sorts of activities to make open source continue to be deserving of the trust we’ve all placed in it, that can’t rest solely on unfunded volunteers. Companies have to participate, shoulder up and help. that the transparency in open source, the promise that anyone can modify and study the source code, that transparency has to also be sort of dialed up for the amount of code that’s out there today. There’s so much more code than there used to be in open source, and the ratio of number of humans reviewing code to amount of code published has changed. That increases the risk a bit.
Omkhar Arasaratnam (05:57)
That’s some great advice as to where to start. Now we can slowly see over the horizon, the holiday season fast approaching. I know I’m, you’ve certainly had some great accomplishments. We’ve had some great shared work that we’ve done together. As you look to your second year in your role, what are your priorities? What’s in front of you and what would you like us to focus on?
Aeva Black (06:20)
Yeah, for myself and my team here at CISA, I’ll share that I knew things would be different in the public sector. It’s my first time in a public sector role. Hiring in any role is never as fast as we want it to be. We find a great candidate and the machinery of the organization, private sector or public sector, it’s always slower than we wish. So one of my priorities is continuing to grow my team and to bring more knowledge about open source and from the open source community into roles in the public sector, not just in my team, right, but across the agency and supporting other teams that don’t yet have as much knowledge about open source. Right? So a lot of internal awareness and training in terms of outward work. There’s been a lot that I find really encouraging with groups like FreeBSD’s attestation to the NIST secure software development framework.
A year ago, I had thought that there was no way to make the SSDF work for open source. And I was proven wrong and I’m delighted by that. And now I’m seeing a number of additional foundations and projects working towards a similar goal with their community and their funders working together to raise the bar on how and what secure assurances can be made about the process by which community-stewarded open source is developed. It’s not interesting who’s writing it, but how is it written? How is it tested? How is it assured? I’m really encouraged to see more of that and look forward to partnering with folks, including the OpenSSF towards more of that.
Omkhar Arasaratnam (07:58)
And we look forward to working with you, Aeva. So now is the time in the podcast in which we move to the rapid-fire section. I’m going to prompt you with a couple of different answers. There’s always a possibility that I’ve missed something, and you give me what you’d prefer your answer to be. Now I feel like I have some insight to the first question because we’ve eaten together several times,
Aeva Black (08:23)
That we have!
Omkhar Arasaratnam (8:24)
But spicy versus mild food, Aeva?
Aeva Black (08:27)
It depends if it’s Indian food, spicy, if it’s Mexican medium to mild.
Omkhar Arasaratnam (08:32)
And if it’s sushi, mild.
Aeva Black (08:34)
I mean, jalapenos on sushi can be really good.
Omkhar Arasaratnam (08:37)
Hmm. Yes. Yes, I agree. I take that back. Fair enough. Or a nice spicy salmon roll, perhaps.
Aeva Black (08:45)
True. Yeah.
Omkhar Arasaratnam (08:47)
Alright. Text editor of choice: Vi, VS code, Emacs?
Aeva Black (08:52)
Easy, easy. Vim. I’ve always used Vim. I have my system set up, put me in Emacs, I usually have to shell, like use a different shell to kill it because I get stuck.
Omkhar Arasaratnam (09:00)
(Laughter) Well, I mean, Emacs is an operating system on its own, to be fair. (Laughter)
Aeva Black (09:04)
Yeah, just not one that I’m comfortable in.
Omkhar Arasaratnam (09:06)
I am also a Vim person, so shared, shared joy there. Tabs are spaces?
Aeva Black (09:13)
Spaces.
Omkhar Arasaratnam (09:14)
I knew it. Awesome. All right, Aeva, we’re wrapping up now. So in closing out, I have two final questions. The first one, what advice do you have for somebody entering our field today?
Aeva Black (09:28)
I wish I had an entire podcast on just this one, but really find your hyper-focus. For a lot of us, we can get stuck on things. Figuring out how to get stuck on the things that were good for my career helped me out early on. And building a T-shaped set of knowledge, so go deep first. Once you’ve gone as far as you want to go, then do it again on a different topic, and that builds breadth over time. Certs are nice to have to get past resume filters, but your network is everything. Maintain relationships across jobs. That’s the second big piece of advice I’d give.
Omkhar Arasaratnam (10:05)
I’ll let you in on a secret. I think the last cert that I got was as a Red Hat certified engineer in 2002. Do you want to share with the audience what last cert you got, if any?
Aeva Black (10:16)
It’s the if any part. Yeah. (Laughter) I considered a couple of certs back in the old MySQL days, early career. I never bothered with the Linux certs or the networking certs because I’ve just logged into a system and show that I knew my stuff.
Omkhar Arasaratnam (10:35)
Absolutely agree. Last question, Aeva. What’s your call to action for our listeners?
Aeva Black (10:42)
Well, for the listeners that are or work at a company, be a responsible consumer of open source. And that means participating in the project so you have insight. It means vetting the code and staging it appropriately locally. If you’re not a large corporation, but a member of a community, then my advice is make sure you’re building your community with stable governance and documented norms so that companies can understand how to work with you and that you behave as a group of a community in a predictable way. Predictable release cycles, predictable vulnerability management, all of those sorts of activities as an open source developer help to grow the project. And leave breadcrumbs, leave gaps for new contributors to fill and make sure you’re passing down the ladder to the next generation of contributors.
Omkhar Arasaratnam (11:38)
Excellent advice as always. Aeva Black, thank you so much for joining us on What’s in the SOSS?
Aeva Black (11:43)
Thanks so much for having me, Omkhar. See you around.
Announcer (11:46)
Thank you for listening to What’s in the SOSS? An OpenSSF podcast. Be sure to subscribe to our series of conversations on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to keep up to date on the open source security foundation community, join us online at openssf.org slash get involved. We’ll talk to you next time on What’s in the SOSS?
