Thought Leadership Day on open source, infrastructure, security and community curation on the 17th of October will bring together leading figures from international Open Source communities around security, and provide opportunities to discuss the challenges that exist around security and open source over time.

A well-designed Open Source Program Office (OSPO), when present, is the center of competency for an organization’s open source operations and structure. Here are a dozen ways OSPOs can be a key lever for open source sustainability & security in your organizations.

The Securing Open Source Software Act is in response to the Log4Shell vulnerability discovered in late November 2021. What is the Securing Open Source Software Act about? On 21st September 2022, U.S. Senators Gary Peters (D-MI) and Rob Portman (R-OH), Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, introduced bipartisan legislation, the Securing Open Source Software Act, to help protect federal agencies and critical infrastructure systems by strengthening the security of software.

This year SigstoreCon will be hosted for the first time! The one-day event will take place on October 25, in Detroit Michigan, in co-location with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America. SigstoreCon aims to help accelerate how you secure your software supply chain. The great news is that this is a vendor-neutral conference organized by the open source Sigstore community and will focus on all things Sigstore.

SBOM Everywhere, as the name suggests, is working towards bringing SBOMs to all of open source in a way that is non disruptive. The first effort of the SBOM Everywhere project was to create a plan that enabled the OpenSSF to fund work on the SDPX Python library. We are pleased to announce this plan has been approved and work has started!

The Vulnerability Disclosures Working Group is proud to unveil the next evolution in improving open source coordination of vulnerability disclosures by crafting a new guide focused on the Security researcher or Finder persona. The newly published Guidance for Security Researchers to Coordinate Vulnerability Disclosures with Open Source Software Projects provides valuable best practices on how Finders can best engage and work with the open source community on discovered vulnerabilities.

In response to the growing concern around open source software development, OpenSSF’s Best Practices for Open Source Developers Working Group (WG) has been diligently working with concerned members and community groups on a couple of new guides for developers and consumers of open source.

As part of the OpenSSF’s continued investment in critical open-source projects, we are happy to announce new partnerships and tooling from the Alpha-Omega Project. Alpha-Omega will sponsor critical security work with a $460K grant to the Rust Foundation. This work expands on funding previously announced earlier this year, bringing our total investment to over $1.5M this year.

OpenSSF is excited to announce its newest WG (Working Group), the End Users WG. This WG will focus on representing and addressing the challenges enterprises face when adopting (and using) different open-source technologies and products.

We are excited to release new features from the Scorecards project, the OpenSSF tool that helps maintainers follow best security practices. The Scorecards GitHub Action now supports a REST API for quickly viewing project scores, and we’ve added one of our favorite new features: badges! We hope these additions will make interacting with Scorecards smoother than ever for open source maintainers and consumers.