Ambassadors

Ben Cotton is the Open Source Community Lead at Kusari. He has been active in Fedora and other open source communities for over a decade. His career has taken him through the public and private sector in roles that include desktop support, high-performance computing administration, marketing, and program management. Ben is the author of Program Management for Open Source Projects.

Brandt is a Staff Software Engineer with a passion for Open Source. He serves as a Maintainer and Technical Lead for the CNCF Security & Compliance Technical Advisory Group, a Cloud Native Ambassador, and a project maintainer within the OpenSSF for the Zarf Project. He has lead and contributed to multiple foundation working groups, to include publishing artifacts to enhance end-user security.

Ejiro is a cybersecurity professional and open-source advocate passionate about open-source security, cloud technologies, and digital resilience in Africa and globally. She contributes to open source projects like Openssf, focused on strengthening awareness and collaboration around secure open-source ecosystems. Her interests include cybersecurity research, open-source security, and security awareness within the African tech ecosystem, with a growing focus on deepening her technical expertise and contributing to real-world security solutions.

Hannah is an Associate Product Security Engineer at Red Hat, focusing on proactively securing complex open-source systems. With a B.S. in Computer Engineering from NC State University, she brings a deep background in microarchitecture and embedded systems to her work in the open-source ecosystem. As an active contributor to several projects and Working Groups within the OpenSSF, she is passionate about pragmatic development and using automation to enhance security workflows. She currently serves as the Community Manager for the OpenSSF Gemara Project and excels at making technical concepts digestible for all audiences. Outside of her work, she enjoys traveling, hiking, and exploring art exhibitions.

John is a Principal Consultant at ControlPlane, where he helps some of the world’s most security-conscious organizations build and assure mission-critical platforms. He is a maintainer of the Witness and Archivista sub-projects under in-toto and serves as a co-chair of the CNCF’s TAG Security. John is also actively involved in several initiatives within the OpenSSF. Prior to joining ControlPlane, he was the Director of Open Source at TestifySec and held engineering leadership roles at VMware.

Justin Cappos is a NYU professor and a creator of five Linux Foundation projects: TUF, in-toto, Uptane, SBOMit, and gittuf. His research advances are adopted into production use by Google, RedHat/IBM, VMware, Docker, Amazon, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Datadog,  Bloomberg, millions of automobiles, and other IoT devices, and are also used to protect the legal code across a variety of jurisdictions, including Washington DC, Baltimore, and the State of Maryland.

Kadi is passionate about the DevOps / DevSecOps community since her days of working with COBOL development and Mainframe solutions. At ReversingLabs she collaborates with developers and security researchers to help entities prioritize their open source risk, reduce technical debt, and meet compliance objectives. When she’s not working with the developer community, she loves running, traveling, and hanging out with her dog Milo.

Katherine Druckman is a senior technologist, speaker, and longtime advocate for open ecosystems. Currently Head of Community and Partnership Engagement at JetBrains, she specializes in developer experience, combining software ecosystem strategy, content strategy, and community building, grounded in a foundation of hands-on software engineering experience and proven leadership. She is a long-time open source advocate, developer, and podcaster, and is currently the host of the Reality 2.0 podcast.

Rob is a Field CTO @ControlPlane – He likes to talk about how Security is fundamental to DevOps and how Kubernetes often isn’t the best answer to your reliability problem. A CNCF Ambassador and organiser of KCD Melbourne and CloudCon SYD, he has spent the last several years helping enterprises navigate the intersection of platform engineering, security, and cloud transformation. He participates in the CNCF TAG Security APAC group and brings a community-first perspective to his work  believing that open source is how the industry levels the playing field on security.

Roman is a cybersecurity expert, engineer, and leader with over 20 years of hands-on experience securing complex systems and products at scale. Currently Principal Architect at Red Hat, he leads open-source security strategy, upstream collaboration, and cross-industry initiatives focused on building trusted software ecosystems. Previously, Roman led Product Security & Privacy for Data Center and AI software at Intel. He is a Security Champion for several open-source projects and an active contributor to working groups under the OpenSSF, Eclipse Foundation, and other global initiatives.

Tabatha DiDomenico is an open source security engineer and advocate focused on the people and practices that keep open source secure and sustainable. She’s president of Security BSides Orlando, co-hosts the GR-OSS Out podcast, and contributes to OpenSSF and FINOS projects and working groups. At G-Research, she’s part of the Open Source team, working on supply chain security, secure open source practices, and community and developer relations.

Walter Pearce is a key leader of the Rust Foundation’s Security Initiative. Walter comes from a 14-year career in security. For the past seven years, he has specialized in offensive security in the gaming industry, leading efforts to find and mitigate vulnerabilities affecting tens of millions of players at Epic Games and Blizzard Entertainment. Before that, he was a security consultant providing penetration testing, red teaming, and code review services for many Fortune 100 companies whose foci included operating systems, languages, and embedded systems. Walter has always had a passion for technical security problems and has built his career helping craft novel solutions to new, challenging issues in security. In his spare time, Walter enjoys playing open source games. He was previously a contributor and member of the Amethyst Game Engine and a lead contributor on other open source game development projects.

Yunseong Choi is a cybersecurity strategist dedicated to resilient open-source ecosystems. An adjunct professor at Kyonggi University and lecturer at Korea University, he bridges the gap between academic research and pragmatic open-source security practices. As a member of the Presidential Council on National AI Strategy in South Korea, he spearheads national initiatives for SBOM/VEX standardization and compliance automation. He actively promotes global collaboration within the OpenSSF to ensure secure, sustainable open-source ecosystems for developers worldwide.