FAQ

The OpenSSF is a cross-industry collaboration that brings together leaders to improve the security of open source software (OSS) by building a broader community, targeted initiatives, and best practices

The OpenSSF brings together open source security initiatives under one foundation to accelerate work through cross-industry support. This is beginning with the Core Infrastructure Initiative and the Open Source Security Coalition, and will include new working groups that address vulnerability disclosures, security tooling and more.

Likely a bit of both but first we need to come to agreement on the problems we are tackling together and then will decide how best to solve them cooperatively as one foundation.

The CII was funded largely by grants, OpenSSF will be supported by Linux Foundation membership dues with targeted organization contributions to support initiatives. The CII’s ongoing work is being transitioned to the OpenSSF, and we expect that the CII will eventually be dissolved as the OpenSSF replaces it.

All of the OSSC members and their projects will now be a part of the OpenSSF.

OpenSSF is focused on improving the security of open source software (OSS) by building a broader community with targeted initiatives and best practices. It will start with a focus on metrics, tooling, best practices, developer identity validation and vulnerability disclosures best practices. In the future, there is a plan to focus resources on the most mission-critical software identified by Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science.

The OpenSSF was established on the premise that security researchers need a mechanism to allow them to collaboratively to address methods needed to secure the open source security supply chain. It recognizes that security researchers across the globe within organizations have common interests and concerns. OpenSSF facilitates sustained dialogue and project work among private entities, foundations and academia.

As open source has become more pervasive, its security has become a key consideration for building and maintaining critical infrastructure that supports mission-critical systems throughout our society. It is more important than ever that we bring the industry together in a collaborative and focused effort to advance the state of open source security. The world’s technology infrastructure depends on it.

• Public good. We believe the security of open source is a public good and as an industry we have an obligation to address it for the commonwealth of the community.
• Openness and Transparency: We commit to encouraging all interested stakeholders to participate in the foundation and its working groups. The foundation’s work will be made publicly available.
• Maintainers First: We approach the work of contributing to improving the security of open source software with a strong respect for open source maintainers and developers, with an intent to create resources and tooling to help scale security improvements to benefit the open source ecosystem as a whole.
• Diversity, Inclusion, and Representation: We work to actively invite and include people from a range of backgrounds, locations, identities, and perspectives, and promote a culture of mutual respect and inclusiveness as a requirement for participation
• Agility and Delivery: We work to deliver concrete and useful outputs and tools to help make open source more secure. We do so in a manner that enables us to learn from experience and experiment, and improve our outputs accordingly.
• Credit where credit is due: We commit to a culture where people’s contributions are recognized and acknowledged fairly.
• Neutrality: We don’t bias toward any ecosystem, vendor or platforms.
• Empathy: We recognize and understand each other’s challenges, perspective and circumstances. We commit to a culture of listening and caring for multiple opinions.

The founding members are GitHub, Google, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, NCC Group, OWASP Foundation and Red Hat, among others.

• Vulnerability Disclosures: The vision is an open source software ecosystem where the time to fix a vulnerability and deploy that fix across the ecosystem is measured in minutes, not months. Create a unified format and API for vulnerability reporting / coordinated disclosure and drive broad adoption
• Security Tooling: Our mission is to provide the best security tools for open source developers and make them universally accessible. We want to create a space where members can collaborate together to improve upon existing security tooling and develop new ones to suit the needs of the broader open source community
• Identifying Security Threats to Open Source Projects: The objective is to enable stakeholders to have informed confidence in the security of open source projects. We will identify a set of key metrics and build tooling (API, web UI) to communicate those metrics to stakeholders, enabling those stakeholders to better understand the security posture of individual open source components.
• Security Best Practices: The objective is to provide open source developers with best practices recommendations.
• Securing Critical Projects: The objective is to perform audits, assurance, response teams, improvements and hands on tactical work.

Each WG will have an associated Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and will self govern with their own respective technical charter, a typical approach within the Linux Foundation that separates business (funding) governance from technical governance.

No, as with any Linux Foundation effort, any technical effort is open to all and doesn’t require funding to participate (just like any other open source project).

Neither the Governing Board (GB) nor the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) is responsible for managing the foundation hosted WGs and projects directly. Instead, the maintainers of those projects manage them; this includes defining the governance process. The GB is responsible for the budget and the TAC the overall technical strategy.

No, all project-related decisions are made by the project maintainers. Maintainership and governance processes are decided by the projects without regard to OpenSSF membership.

All work is happening in the open and the OpenSSF TAC lists all technical initiatives.

Diversity, Inclusion, and Representation is one of our core values. We will create an inclusive culture and make sure everyone is respected and valued. We will explore opportunities to work within the community and with the Linux Foundation on related efforts.

Anyone can contribute to the Open Source Security Foundation. Get involved by visiting: https://openssf.org/getinvolved/ and https://github.com/ossf