Summary
In this episode of What’s in the SOSS, host CRob is joined by the “Council of Daves” – Dr. David A. Wheeler of the OpenSSF and Dave Russo from Red Hat – for a deep dive into the intersection of secure software development and education. From their open source origin stories to the challenges of educating developers and managers alike, this conversation covers key initiatives like the LFD121 course, upcoming resources on the EU Cyber Resilience Act, and how AI is shifting the landscape.
Whether you’re a developer, manager, or just open source curious, this is your crash course in why security training matters more than ever.
Conversation Highlights
Intro & Meet the Council of Daves (0:16)
Open Source Origin Stories (1:22)
The Role of the Education SIG (4:05)
Why Secure Software Education Is Critical (6:30)
Inside the LFD121 Secure Development Course (8:01)
Training Managers on Secure SDLC Practices (12:24)
Why AI Makes Education More Important, Not Less (13:53)
What’s Next in Security Education: CRA 101 and More (16:04)
Rapid Fire Round: VI vs. EMACS, Tabs or Spaces & Mascots (20:20)
Final Thoughts & Call to Action (22:04)
Transcript
[Dave Russo] (0:00 – 0:16)
If you’re a people manager, understanding the amount of time and effort and skills that are needed to perform these different activities is vital to know.
[CRob] (0:16 – 0:46)
Hello and welcome to What’s in the SOSS, the OpenSSF’s podcast where we talk to interesting people from around the amazing open source ecosystem. I’m Krobe, your host. Today we have a real treat.
I’m joined by the Council of Daves and we’re going to talk about a topic that is near and dear to both our hearts, but let’s start off with some introductions. I’ll go with David Wheeler first, and then we’ll go to Dave Rousseau. So David, why don’t you introduce yourself real quick?
[David Wheeler] (0:47 – 1:03)
Okay, sure. David Wheeler. I work at the Open Source Security Foundation, OpenSSF, which is part of the Linux Foundation, and I’ve been involved in how do you develop secure software or developing open source software for literally decades.
[Dave Russo] (1:03 – 1:20)
My name is Dave Russo. I work at Red Hat on the product security team. I’m the governance portfolio manager.
I don’t have quite as long a history with open source as Dr. Wheeler does, but I’ve been working on SDLC related activities for quite some time.
[CRob] (1:22 – 1:33)
Awesome. I think we’re gonna have a great chat today about secure software development and education, but let’s get your open source origin stories. Dave Rousseau, how did you get involved in upstream open source?
[Dave Russo] (1:34 – 2:18)
So I was not directly involved in open source for very long in my previous arrangement. I did do some work in the software industry, then I was working in an industry that was not around development. So around 2016, when I joined Red Hat, my good friend Krobe introduced me to a lot of the awesome open source stuff that was going on in and around Red Hat and the upstreams a little bit prior to that.
And a lot of the conversation was aligned with SDLC activities, specifically secure development practices, which is an interest of mine. And then after joining Red Hat, obviously I became much more involved in a lot of different areas of open source, primarily around, again, secure development.
[CRob] (2:19 – 2:24)
Cool.
David Wheeler, how did you get involved? What’s your origin story?
[David Wheeler] (2:24 – 3:46)
That one’s a little challenging because I’ve been involved in it for such a long time, I don’t even remember the first time I gave, you know, I just just contributed to release some, well, what wasn’t called open source software, because the term hadn’t been invented yet.
People were occasionally sharing around source code. Since before I was born, frankly, they just didn’t use these terms. And, you know, necessarily have figured out some of the legal stuff.
So I think the big change to me, though, was the first time I held a very, very early version of Red Hat Linux in my hand. This is back when it was being distributed on CDs. Because at the time, there was a general agreement that yes, of course, people can share source code on, you know, on bulletin boards, and maybe this internet thing, but you couldn’t build something big with it.
And all of a sudden, an entire operating system was open source, and useful. And I think this is where instead of the, oh, sure, we can sometimes share with this, oh, this can be used for building large scale systems. And that was kind of the, and I later on did analysis of this and been doing things involving open source for quite well, since before the name was created.
[CRob] (3:46 – 4:04)
Cool. Well, thanks for sharing, gentlemen. So let’s dive into it.
Dave Russo, you are the current chair of the OpenSSF’s Education SIG, which is part of the BEST working group. Could you maybe talk a little bit about what the Education SIG is and what you all get into?
[Dave Russo] (4:05 – 4:27)
Sure. So the Education SIG is obviously around educating our open source developers to do a better job of incorporating security practices in the development and delivery of these projects. Now, a lot of my previous life experience was in development, so I’ve got a fairly good amount of experience in this area.
[David Wheeler] (4:28 – 4:39)
It is very obvious to a lot of people who’ve been doing this for a while that education has not been a focus area when it comes to developers, especially around security.
[Dave Russo] (4:40 – 6:17)
Developers are mostly interested in creating cool new stuff, which I completely agree with. That is the primary purpose is to put new features and functionality in their software to make it do more cool things, better, faster, stronger, etc. However, security for the longest time was not even a consideration for a lot of software development and delivery.
And over the past 10, maybe 15 years, there’s been a little bit more attention paid to it. But there’s been a movement to try and provide good education courses that talk about secure development practices to the development communities themselves. So at the Education SIG, what we are trying to do is help address that need.
We’re trying to help understand what kind of information and materials we can provide to our upstream communities to help the developers understand what it means when we talk about developing and delivering software more securely and specific techniques and ways that they can incorporate this into their projects, such as hardening guides, delivery guides, compiler rules, general awareness of some of the reasons behind having security, not only from a risk based perspective, just making the project a little bit more robust, but now also because of a lot of international regulations and expectations by different industries and geos that are compelling developers of various types to provide very specific attestations or statements of conformity when it comes to doing things in a certain way while they’re doing their development delivery.
[CRob] (6:17 – 6:30)
Awesome. So it sounds like, Dave, you touched on it a little bit. But David, could you maybe expand a little bit about you know, why do you feel it’s important to get this type of content in the hands of developers?
[David Wheeler] (6:30 – 8:01)
Well, I think the short answer is that if developers don’t know how to develop secure software, they won’t develop secure software. It really is that simple. I often tell people that we get software that’s more secure than we deserve.
Because why should we expect that software be secure when for the most part, developers aren’t told how to do that? It’s it’s it’s not a magic trick, but it does require some knowledge. By the way, we actually did a survey of developers about the state of secure software development education last year.
And I mean, we found that overall, you know, 28% of the professionals weren’t familiar with secure software development. It jumped up to 75% for those who had less than a year of experience because the colleges and universities for the most part, are not requiring it. And so yes, they they increasingly get it over on the job.
But the on the job is often spotty, it has holes. And by the time they become more knowledgeable, there’s more that have come in, again, with that lack of knowledge. And so we’re just constantly on this treadmill of people who don’t know how to do it.
And lack of training was the was one of the primary reasons that people gave for why don’t you know how to do this.
[CRob] (8:01 – 8:17)
So I’m aware that the SIG has a couple artifacts that they work on. The first thing we’ll talk about is the LFD 121 course. So maybe Dr. Wheeler, if you could give a little taste about what that is all about.
[David Wheeler] (8:18 – 8:30)
Absolutely. I’ll quickly note, by the way, both of my participants have used my title doctor, I do have a PhD. But my experience is when people use my title, they’re just yanking my chain.
[CRob] (8:30 – 8:32)
So we love you, sir.
[David Wheeler] (8:33 – 10:14)
Well, thank you. Yeah, so the so we’ve got a course called LFD 121, developing secure software.
Now, we’re here talking about open source. But I want to make sure everybody knows that this is absolutely for open source software. It’s also for closed source software.
It’s for anybody who develops software, because the frank reality is attackers don’t care what your license is. They just don’t. They just want to take over things and do bad stuff and make everyone stay miserable.
So we’re here to help developers deal with that. I just looked at the numbers and we have including, you know, up to now, for both our Japanese and English through edX and through TI, all these are, we’ve had over 30,000 in [Crob: Wow], in that course, which is, you know, fantastic. That’s a lot of people.
That’s a lot of people. So we’ve got a course, we very much focus on the practical, how do you do stuff. And we have optional hands on labs, they’re not required.
But we do encourage people at least do a few. Because doing things hands on is really, really helpful. I’ll do a quick note.
Some people have gotten the wrong impression that security is always expensive. Generally, that’s not true. It’s retrofitting security.
That’s expensive. And so what we should be doing is stopping the retrofit. It’s not hard to do most of the stuff if you just know ahead of time what you’re supposed to do.
But once you once you’ve dug the hole deep, it’s very hard to get out.
[CRob] (10:15 – 10:21)
Speaking of security, not being expensive. This sounds like an amazing class. How much does it cost to take?
[David Wheeler] (10:23 – 10:48)
Oh, what a pitch. Of course, as you know, it’s completely free. The course is free, the labs are free, whole thing’s free.
So, you know, please don’t please don’t make costs a limiting factor for this. You know, it’s basically important for us all around the world that anybody who develops software knows the basics. And that’s what this this particular course covers.
[CRob] (10:49 – 11:08)
So a big part of your world, Dave Russo, is, you know, secure software development and SDLC, secure development lifecycle. From your perspective, you’ve looked at the LFD 121 class. What do you find that to be a useful artifact as you’re sharing it with your engineers?
It is.
[Dave Russo] (11:08 – 12:23)
The content in the course does a very good job at talking about what the different activities that should take place along the different times of the software lifecycle should be. And again, to kind of repeat from what we said earlier, awareness is a big problem that we have. A lot of developers don’t understand what it means when we say we should develop things securely.
And then you start using words like risk assessment, penetration testing, threat modeling, attack surface analysis, and people’s eyes just kind of glaze over because they have no idea what you’re talking about. The course is able to go into these topics and provide a good amount of information, provide an understanding to a developer what we mean when we talk about these sorts of things. And additionally, to David’s point earlier, making the developers aware of this early so they can build it into the plan instead of trying to go back and do it after certain things have been done, makes adopting and implementing these things much, much easier.
So the combination of knowing what these activities actually are, the amount of effort that is needed to complete them, and when to insert them into the lifecycle make the course absolutely invaluable for people who are doing software development.
[CRob] (12:24 – 12:38)
That was one of the OG projects that David Wheeler brought into the foundation. Let’s talk about some of the more current work. Who would like to talk about the security for developer manager class we’ve all been working on?
[Dave Russo] (12:38 – 13:52)
So I’ll go and I’ll start off from a general level. And then I’ll let David go into some things a little bit more in depth. So the intent of the secure software development for managers course is to again, inform.
Awareness is a problem. If I’m a development manager, and someone says to me, you need to do your stuff securely, what does that mean? There’s a lot of different factors involved.
From a risk perspective, if we don’t do these activities, what does that mean? What does it mean for the actual software itself? What does it mean for the organization or company that I work for?
What kind of risk may be exposing the company to? More importantly, if you’re a people manager, understanding the amount of time and effort and skills that are needed to perform these different activities is vital to know. You need to understand when to put these things into roadmaps and timelines, how much time to allocate for them.
And does anybody on your team actually know what it means to do, for example, a penetration test? If not, you’re going to need to find some additional resources to help you with that. So again, not necessarily diving down into the deep weeds on a lot of these topics.
This is meant to provide additional awareness and understanding to someone who’s in a development manager position.
[David Wheeler] (13:53 – 16:04)
And if I can jump in with some additions. Fundamentally, if management’s not on board, it’s probably not going to happen.
And unfortunately, some managers are kind of assuming things like, well, the the IT security department will somehow take care of it. Well, no, they won’t. They certainly do have an important role to play.
There are things that they that they will do that will be very, very helpful. But if you’re managing the development of software, there are things that you as a manager need to know need to do need to make possible. We spend more than a little time in the course helping you understand some terminology, understanding what needs to happen, and frankly, making sure one of the key things a manager needs to do is making sure that the developers know what they need to know.
In many organizations, managers aren’t necessarily writing the code, but they need to make sure that the people they’re bringing in know what they need to know. And if they don’t, fixing that with what is fundamentally a training problem, an education problem. Because just like any other field, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re not likely to do a good job.
And it doesn’t mean that they’re stupid. It just means that they lack some important information. I will quickly note, just because I’m thinking of it.
Lots of people talking about AI. AI is awesome. The majority of developers nowadays are using AI to develop code, according to some surveys.
And here’s the problem. Just because some AI generated code does not make it secure code. What do you think that that system was trained on?
Right. So this actually AI is actually increasing the need for education by developers and by their managers. Because if you’re using an AI system, who is going to be reviewing it?
Not just the AI, I hope. You’re going to need people to know what they’re doing. Which brings us back to the need for more education.
The increased need for education, not the decreased need because of AI.
[CRob] (16:04 – 16:15)
Excellent point. Broadly, what other things are on the horizon from an education perspective? What do you got in the hopper in the back? It’s going to come down the road.
[David Wheeler] (16:18 – 16:20)
Well, Dave, you want to go ahead?
[Dave Russo] (16:20 – 18:23)
Sure. So the USSF is putting a lot of attention on education.
There’s some expectations as to what our SIG can help contribute moving forward in 2025. And again, I’ll hit this from an awareness perspective, I think, and I’ll let David dive in to a couple things a little bit deeper. We need to get the message out.
We need to get information out there into the upstream communities and the projects and let them know what it is we’re trying to accomplish and what materials we already have that they could leverage and use right now, as well as understanding how to bring more people into the group, into the USSF in general, and provide their subject matter expertise to help us generate even more materials on top of that.
So we’re going to be making some additions to the information we’ve got on our GitHub page and such. We’re going to try and socialize some of the things that we’ve already put together as a group, some of the hardening guides we’ve done, we already talked about some of the education courses that are being worked on. We’re taking a little bit of a look right now, something that’s in progress, a little bit of behind the curtain for everybody.
We’re working on a CRA 101 course. Again, the EU Cyber Resiliency Act has been passed by their parliament, and everyone is trying to understand exactly what that means to them. So we’re trying to put, again, a general information course together that makes it digestible for people with a couple different types of roles to understand what the CRA means and what the expectations are going to be moving forward as it begins to come into effect.
So these regulations are becoming more common. There’s a couple other ones that are in progress at various geographies around the world, so we expect we’re probably going to do this for a couple other ones as they become available. Hopefully, we’ll have some representatives speaking at certain conferences, talking about the OSSF mission in general, some of the education information in particular, and again, trying to make sure that we are looking at the right ways to bring the right information to our constituency.
David?
[David Wheeler] (18:24 – 20:18)
Yeah, so let me jump in specifically on the Cyber Resilience Act, which is kind of a big thing that’s coming up. Strictly speaking, it only applies to software, and so on, that is released to the EU market.
I guess more accurately, I should say products with digital elements, which is the term of art that they use within the regulation. But the reality is, Europe’s a big place. Most organizations, especially in the software world, are global.
So this is going to affect many, many, many. Indeed, it’ll affect many who have never really needed to look at this kind of thing before. And so we’ve been trying to develop this, what we’ve been calling a CRA 101.
We actually even have an official number for it, it’s LFEL 1001, when it’ll get released. But basically, it’s a little introduction, explanation, what does this say? What does it require?
And it’s going to be a big change, I think, to industry, to the market. It even has some requirements specifically on what’s called open source software stewards. It’s a relatively light touch, but it does impose some requirements.
It does talk about open source software developers. I think in many cases, it will be much less of a touch, but it’s not completely none. And so this is going to affect, and of course, people who develop open source software, that software usually gets pulled into larger systems in many cases.
So this is going to affect a lot of folks. And so it’s gonna be important for us all to be prepared. So we’ve been working very hard to get that introduction developed, and we’re hoping to get that out the door as soon as we can.
[CRob] (20:20 – 20:43)
Excellent. Well, I’m looking forward to taking it, so I can become smart about the CRA. Thank you, gentlemen.
Let’s move on to the rapid fire part of the interview. All right. I got a couple wacky questions, and I would like you both to answer the first thing that comes to your mind.
First, most important question. VI or EMACS?
[Dave Russo] (20:43 – 20:44)
VI.
[David Wheeler] (20:44 – 20:45)
VIM.
[CRob] (20:46 – 20:54)
Excellent answer. Now, the next one, potentially even more controversial.
Tabs or spaces?
[David Wheeler] (20:55 – 20:56)
Spaces.
[Dave Russo] (20:56 – 20:56)
Spaces.
[David Wheeler] (20:58 – 20:59)
Always spaces.
[CRob] (20:59 – 21:09)
I can go back and count, but that is a very contentious, verging on religion for many people. What’s your favorite open source mascot?
[Dave Russo] (21:11 – 21:11)
Tux the Penguin.
[David Wheeler] (21:12 – 21:14)
Oh, it’s it’s hard to beat Tux.
[CRob] (21:16 – 21:17)
Classic.
[David Wheeler] (21:18 – 21:27)
Classic.
I’m planning to print up one on a 3D printer soon, because Tux is fun. But I will say that Honk the Goose. Honk the Goose?
[CRob] (21:28 – 21:28)
Honk the Goose.
[David Wheeler] (21:28 – 21:29)
He is a kind of fun goose.
[CRob] (21:29 – 21:36)
I am personally a fan of the goose. And last question. What’s your favorite vegetable?
[Dave Russo] (21:37 – 21:38)
None of the above.
[David Wheeler] (21:39 – 21:43)
I’ll count corn as a vegetable. Corn on the cob.
[CRob] (21:43 – 22:04)
There you go. Thank you, gentlemen.
Now, as we wrap up, do you have a call to action or some advice you’d like to share with our listeners who are where they have a lot of people across the industry that listen to this newcomers or people that aren’t familiar with open source or cyber security? So what kind of advice or what call to action do you have for our listeners?
[Dave Russo] (22:04 – 22:31)
Get involved.
Get involved. Understand what’s out there. The OpenSSF has a lot of really good information, a lot of different working groups that are going through things that affect all the open source communities, trying to, you know, make our security better, reach farther, make us more proficient in those areas. So if there’s something you think you contribute or if it’s something you want to learn or just want to listen and see what’s going on, join a couple of the working group calls and see what’s happening.
[CRob] (22:32 – 22:34)
Excellent. David?
[David Wheeler] (22:34 – 23:41)
I’ve got a couple.
So for get involved, if you’re interested in security, open source and security, obviously OpenSSF, if you are the happy user of an open source project where it’s starting to become important to you, get involved in that project. If you are a developer of software, please, please learn how to develop secure software. I think our course is great.
I don’t really care if you take that course per se. If you take another course, that’s great. Because what’s more important is all of society now depends on software.
We need that software to be more secure. And the vast, vast, vast majority of the problems we’re seeing today are the same problems we’ve been having for decades. It’s well understood how to systemically counter them.
But people need to know how to do it first. And I, I don’t, as I said earlier, AI is not going to change that. AI will simply mean that we can write bad code faster.
It means we can write good code faster. But to write the good code, the humans have to know what good code looks like.
[CRob] (23:43 – 24:05)
Well, what a difference some Daves make. Gentlemen, some of my favorite people to collaborate with. I appreciate your time and all of your contributions to help trying to improve the quality of life for open source developers and ultimately the users that use all that amazing software.
So that’s a wrap. Thank you all for joining What’s in the SOSS and happy security, everybody.
(24:09 – 24:46)
Like what you’re hearing? Be sure to subscribe to What’s in the SOSS on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Antenapod, Pocketcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. There’s a lot going on with the OpenSSF and many ways to stay on top of it all.
Check out the newsletter for open source news, upcoming events and other happenings. Go to OpenSSF.org slash newsletter to subscribe. Connect with us on LinkedIn for the most up to date OpenSSF news and insight and be a part of the OpenSSF community at OpenSSF.org slash get involved. Thanks for listening, and we’ll talk to you next time on What’s in the SOSS.