Podcast

0:00 JavaScript’s Critical Web Presence
0:51 Robin Bender Ginn Introduces OpenJS Foundation
2:01 Core Challenges Facing JavaScript Ecosystem
4:12 Managing Older Projects and Outdated Software
8:23 Solutions and Security Improvements
12:12 Individual Impact and Community Involvement
14:35 Wrap-Up and Call to Action

• Robin Bender Ginn LinkedIn page
• OpenJS website
• OpenJS YouTube channel
• OpenJS Slack channel
• Learn more and register for JSConf North America 
• Get involved with the OpenSSF
• Subscribe to the OpenSSF newsletter
• Follow the OpenSSF on LinkedIn

Robin Bender Ginn: 0:02
Anything you do requires JavaScript, whether it’s AI or in the metaverse. People forget that JavaScript is a critical part of delivering almost everything you do.

CRob: 0:17
Welcome, welcome, welcome to What’s in the SOSS, the OpenSSS podcast where we talk to amazing people and technologists within the space of open source, open source supply chain and software security. We have a real treat today. We have a friend of the foundation, Robin Ginn, and we are going to hear some amazing stuff about her little corner of this amazing world called open source. So, Robin, why don’t you introduce yourself and maybe share what’s your open source origin story for our audience?

Robin Bender Ginn: 0:51
Super cool. Well, hey, thanks for having me. I’m just super psyched to be here. We kind of have a little I would say we have a little corner for JavaScript. We have a big sort of footprint in the world. If you think about the web, JavaScript’s in 98% of the world’s websites. And I have the honor of being the executive director of the OpenJS Foundation. I’ve been there since the beginning and OpenJS was the merger of the Node.js Foundation with the JS, the JavaScript Foundation, a little over five years ago. So, I came on after a long career at Microsoft doing open source to lead up this wonderful organization. So super psyched to be here.

CRob: 1:39
That’s cool and we’re very glad for all the amazing work that comes out of your community super used around the web. From your perspective, having done this for a while, what do you see are some of the core challenges facing the world of JavaScript and the web ecosystem that impacts security?

Robin Bender Ginn: 2:01
Well, you know, I think we have the coolest developers around. Again, anything you do requires JavaScript, whether it’s AI or in the metaverse. People forget that JavaScript is a critical part of delivering almost everything you do. But unfortunately, one of the key challenges is the world of tech suffers from this shiny penny we call it the shiny penny syndrome.

Robin Bender Ginn: 2:26
People love the latest and greatest things and, you know, sometimes JavaScript and the web may not be seen as strategic as it truly is. That sort of creates a kind of a ripple effect on some other challenges we face. So whether that is raising money, you know, sustainability is very important. We have a lot of volunteers running our open source projects. As opposed to some company led projects, we have a lot of community led projects. So if you think about Node.js, it was downloaded 2 billion times last year, wow, wow. And that’s a lot of volunteers and, unfortunately, a lot of companies who all rely on, for example, Node.js, treat our really hardworking, passionate volunteers like they are their paid support staff and create a lot of demands on these folks. So those, you know, leads to burnout and all these other things.

CRob: 3:33
And that’s something that many of the communities we talk with and interact with feel similarly. They have similar challenges.

Robin Bender Ginn: 3:39
Yeah.

CRob: 3:42
Yeah, I think you probably touched on this a bit with your statement of being kind of a seminal foundation for the web. It’s hard to be a little older speaking as someone that has a little more gray in their hair than they used to, and OpenJS holds some really interesting kind of oldies but goodie type projects like Node.js and jQuery. You know how that impacts your maintainers and end users, where it seems like there are so many people that are using outdated or unsupported open source software?

Robin Bender Ginn: 4:22
Yeah, I mean, it does you know? Sometimes it sucks to be old, but in our case I would say that we have broad adoption. So Node.js, again 15 years old, it’s basically everywhere. Node is everywhere. Express.js, you know, 30 plus million. You know weekly downloads. Jquery, 18 years old. It’s in 92% of the world’s websites. So you know, what’s great is the adoption, the stability. The maintainers, many of them have been with the project for 10 plus years. It’s awesome.

Robin Bender Ginn: 4:59
And yeah, so we have this beautiful culture around these projects. You know, some of the challenges are a couple of things that we fixed. One is that our infrastructure got to be a little messy.

Robin Bender Ginn: 5:17
Let’s just put it that way, not quite like wobbly servers in people’s closets, but you know we had to do like an archaeological dig over the last couple of years to find out who in the years past, you know, had a handshake deal with this IT infrastructure company, who had access. So we’ve, you know we’ve done a lot on the infrastructure front to kind of clean that up. But, as you mentioned, a core challenge with older projects is that a lot of people are still using old versions that are unsupported and outdated.

Robin Bender Ginn: 5:55
We did some research with IDC Research Al Gillen, a pretty prominent open source developer analyst, and found that three quarters of a billion websites are using out of date jQuery, and of those people we surveyed which is pretty consistent with some other data we’ve seen a third of those reported having security and privacy incidents in the last two years. Yes, the Node project has done some other research to find that three quarters of users on Node.js are using old and outdated versions. Again, with 2 billion downloads, that’s pretty significant too. So we have created a couple of tools for people to see if they’re using current versions, and for us, it may not be our projects that could create a vulnerability, but it’s really a canary in the coal mine. So, for example, if you’re using old jQuery, if you’re using old Node, probably everything else under the hood is old too.

CRob: 7:03
It’s a really good guess.

Robin Bender Ginn: 7:05
Yeah, so if you want to kind of check your website, you can go to healthyweb.org to see if your jQuery is out of date and then the Node project. If you go on GitHub on Node.js, it’s /is-my-node-vulnerable and you can find out if you’re using an outdated version or not.

CRob: 7:29
This is a really kind of a systemic problem. I’ve talked a lot about this with Brian Fox from Sonotype and others in the ecosystem, and this is something that is again another very common problem. We have a lot of different language ecosystems, and, while the nuances of how to work in that particular space is a little different, a lot of the core challenges are identical.

Robin Bender Ginn: 7:52
Yeah, that’s why we wanted to sort of create this sort of idea of a health check. Like you know, you get your health check once a year, make sure you know everything’s spot on with your physical. We want people to like, maybe yearly, like you change your batteries and your smoke alarm, why don’t you take a look at what versions you’re using?

CRob: 8:13
That’s awesome advice. Yeah, so, but it can’t be all doom and gloom. What do you see as some kind of pathways to move us forward to a better future on the web?

Robin Bender Ginn: 8:23
Yeah, we have had a lot of industry support, government support and support from folks like you at OpenSSF and our friends Alpha Omega. So if you think about, you know, the IT infrastructure, we really solved that problem through funding from the Sovereign Tech Agency oh, excellent, which was wonderful. They provided funding for us to do, you know, kind of that archaeological dig, so to speak, and we essentially modernized all of our OpenJS hosted projects onto just a few handful of software companies, whether it’s CDNs or clouds, and that has all been consolidated, migrated, and now we have some great partnerships in place for people who are sponsoring that work. So, for example, like CloudFlare, DigitalOcean, fastly, Microsoft Azure and others. So we know that six months from now, two years from now, that they’re going to be supporting our infrastructure. And what else was your other question? Oh, on how you know.

CRob: 9:37
What else do we do to move it forward? What do you do to move it forward?

Robin Bender Ginn: 9:39
Yeah, I mean really, I think one of the inherent problems with relying on volunteers is the one missing component to our maintainers is having people with security expertise. That is kind of a secret sauce for talking, you know.

CRob: 9:57
Yeah, it is so.

Robin Bender Ginn: 10:00
Through grants, through Alpha-Omega, we’ve been able to fund security engineers.

CRob: 10:05
Yes, oh, that’s awesome.

Robin Bender Ginn: 10:06
Which we couldn’t have done it otherwise. I mean, I think this is maybe the fourth year we’ve had a Node grant from Alpha-Omega. Four years ago the Node project did not have an active security working group. Today it’s a very robust working group. Back in the day four years ago it was very difficult to put out security releases for Node. It was 26 steps for every release.

Robin Bender Ginn: 10:33
Imagine with someone without expertise who wants to sign up for that in their free time nobody right, yeah, so, um, as part of the work um, that security working group now has fully automated their security uh releases, so it’s been like a game changer for the Node project.

CRob: 10:51
I bet Well. It also relieves a lot of the burden from the regular maintainers as well, right?

Robin Bender Ginn: 11:02
Absolutely. They’ve also put out some permissions, guides and policies on what defines a vulnerability and what doesn’t. Our OpenJS Foundation Security Working Group, which we call it LabSpace security working group, which we call it Lab Space. We’re opening up our own CNA, which is pretty cool, so we’ll be communicating more about that. The thing about JavaScript is that I think security vulnerability reports, probably like others, have become like car alarms Ignore, ignore, ignore. So hopefully, with some new policies and kind of having a little more control with this with our own CNA, we’ll kind of alleviate some burden for our folks.

CRob: 11:40
Oh, that’s excellent. That’s so exciting to hear about those amazing changes. I’m so happy for you all.

Robin Bender Ginn: 11:47
Yes, I know, honestly, we couldn’t have done it without the grants that we’ve received from you all and the membership support and the government grants, which we hopefully will go after some more Excellent.

CRob: 12:02
And thinking about can an individual make a difference in the space of web security or are they totally at the mercy of big tech in the space of web security.

Robin Bender Ginn: 12:12
Are they totally at the mercy of big tech? No, I think one of the flip sides of having these community-led projects is that if you want something, if you want to influence an open source project, we kind of have a doers, not a talkers policy. Excellent. So if you’re a doer, if you want a feature, if you want to help, all you have to do is show up. I think, again, we have the most warm and welcoming and fun group of community members. So, as you know, with open source, you can just come to any of our meetings. We have a radical transparency policy at OpenJS in our projects. So our meetings are almost all streamed live on YouTube and on our YouTube channel. So if you want to just lurk, if you want to participate, if there’s something especially you want, you can just be a doer, just show up and do the work. Also, there’s so many ways that you can make a difference. If coding is not your thing, but you want to make a difference, I like to say content is queen.

CRob: 13:17
I love that I’m going to open source that.

Robin Bender Ginn: 13:20
Absolutely so. You know we do a lot with training, documentation, uh, community organizing, um, and so that’s again brought new, brought new community members to our projects that’s amazing.

CRob: 13:35
Well, let’s move on to the rapid fire part of our session here. Right on, let’s do it fire, rapid fire. A couple quick and crazy questions for you. We’ll start off with a controversial one vi or emacs, neither. Oh, what’s your editor of choice?

Robin Bender Ginn: 13:57
I am a writer, I write about code the same.

CRob: 14:03
That’s awesome, cool cool, we’re neutral.

Robin Bender Ginn: 14:05
I’m neutral at Open.js well said, there you go.

CRob: 14:11
Who’s your favorite open source mascot?

Robin Bender Ginn: 14:15
Well, the rocket turtle probably. We had a mascot contest for the Node project 15 years ago. When it was created. We had a turtle icon and a rocket icon and you can see the rocket turtle is our new mascot, that’s awesome. Yeah.

CRob: 14:34
What’s your favorite adult beverage? Water, water flavored water, water, water flavored water, water flavored water well, that is a responsible choice, yes, adult beverage, so I don’t know I had a person just tell me coffee, which I was like you know, you’re right, I love coffee. That is my favorite adult beverage too.

Robin Bender Ginn: 14:55
Yeah, I, yeah, I don’t know.

CRob: 14:58
And then uh kind of uh as we wrap up here thinking about, uh, what call to action would you have for our audience or what advice would you like to share to a newcomer trying to break into this amazing space?

Robin Bender Ginn: 15:13
Um, yeah, I think the one thing I would say is you know, if we had one, I would encourage folks to join our Slack channel. That might be kind of an easy entry way, maybe even a little easier than trying to figure out what’s going on in GitHub. We have so many different channels. We have an icon right on the homepage of our website, so whether you’re interested in security or package metadata, interoperability or standards, we’ve got like an all-star group working on TC39 and some W3C projects. An easy way to get to know folks perhaps is our Slack channel and then you can see what’s going on. We also have a book club and events and other fun things, so you can get to know us. But yeah, it’s a very friendly group. You can always reach out to me too if you’re just not sure where to go, and I’m happy to introduce you to folks in each of these areas.

CRob: 16:08
Well, excellent. Thank you so much for showing up and sharing a little bit about this amazing space that, as you shared, runs a lot of our world today, and especially how we interact with software and services and applications. So thank you for all the work that your foundation does and thank you for the amazing things you do for the community.

Robin Bender Ginn: 16:28
And thanks, CRob, and for all of your folks. You provide a lot of guidance. I know we sometimes bend the rules a little bit to customize things for JavaScript, but you know You’ve got to make things for JavaScript, but you know You’ve got to make it work for the environment you live in. We do. We take all of what the OpenSSF creates and then we maybe tweak it a little bit for what works for our maintainers and end users. And we’ve been working on and we’ll be publishing on our website some new guidelines as well.

CRob: 16:56
Well, I look forward to reading it. Thank you for joining us. Have a great day.

CRob: 17:09
Like what you’re hearing. Be sure to subscribe to What’s in the SOSS on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, antennapod, 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/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/getinvolved. Thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you next time on What’s in the SOSS.

In this episode,CRob is joined by Arun Gupta, Vice President and General Manager of Developer Programs at Intel and OpenSSF Governing Board Chair, and Zach Steindler, Principal Engineer at Github, a member of the OpenSSF TAC and co-chairs the OpenSSF Security Packages Repository Working Group to discuss the key lessons learned from open source security in 2024, the importance of the MVVSR (Mission, Vision, Values, Strategy, and Roadmap) framework, and the exciting initiatives planned for 2025. They highlight the growing reliance on open source, the challenges of dependency vulnerabilities, and the need for better security practices in the industry.

• 00:00 Opening
• 03:29 Key Lessons from Open Source Security in 2024
• 08:29 MVVSR: Mission, Vision, Values, Strategy, and Roadmap
• 13:41 Importance of Strategy and Roadmap in OpenSSF
• 17:48 Roadmap Items for Community Collaboration
• 20:02 Key Resources and Courses for Developers
• 22:09 Exciting Opportunities Ahead for 2025

• Arun’s LinkedIn
• Zach’s LinkedIn
• 2024 Annual Report
• Get involved with the OpenSSF
• Subscribe to the OpenSSF Newsletter
• Follow the OpenSSF on LinkedIn

CRob (00:50.337)
Hello and welcome to What’s in the SOSS, the Open Source Security Foundation’s podcast where we talk to folks from all around the open source ecosystem—interesting developers, thought leaders, and participants within this amazing movement that we call open source. Today, I have some amazing guests on the podcast with us that you may remember from previous sessions. I have Arun and Zach, who are part of the leadership of the foundation, and we’re here today to talk about some of the amazing things we’re planning on doing in 2025. But before we jump into the cool stuff, let’s just briefly, Arun and then Zach, if you could give us a TLDR of who you are and what you do with the foundation.

Arun Gupta (01:38.222)
Absolutely, I can start. Very happy to be here, CRob. Yeah, I’ve been with the OpenSSF Foundation for over two years now, been on the governing board all along. I was the governing board chair for 2024, and I was fortunate enough to be elected again for 2025. So, I guess the work I was doing was liked by somebody at least, so I’m happy to be here. OpenSSF is doing something really, really cool, which we’ll talk about today. And I’m really happy to help with my share.

Zach Steindler (02:18.392)
Yeah, thanks, Arun. I’m Zach Steindler. I work at GitHub on supply chain security for open source users, but also for our enterprise customers. I’m just about to start my third year serving on the OpenSSF TAC. I took over as 2024 tech chair, CRob, when you made the jump into the OpenSSF Chief Architect role. I also co-chair the Securing Software Repositories Working Group, where we get together folks from PyPI, Homebrew, and RubyGems to talk about best practices for securing those ecosystems.

CRob (03:00.161)
Excellent. And I want to thank you both for your ongoing leadership and community involvement. I think 2025 is going to have some amazing stuff in store for us all. Reflecting back, last year, 2024 was a very busy year for the foundation. I would encourage everyone to review our annual report, which came out in December, to see some of the amazing things our community members are working on. But looking at all of that, 2025 looks even busier. From your perspective, Arun, what were some of the key lessons we learned about open source security in 2024?

Arun Gupta (03:41.058)
Yeah, if you look at 2024, a few themes easily emerged. The reliance on open source is only going to grow. If you look at a typical application, roughly 80%, sometimes 90%, of the stack is open source. So it is definitely a critical part of our infrastructure. Pick any industry, vertical, or domain, and open source is prevalent. With a bigger scope comes a bigger attack area as well. The kinds of things we saw include dependency vulnerabilities continuing to be big. It started with Log4Shell during the pandemic back in 2021, and it has only grown. Many organizations still face outdated or insecure dependencies and need help tracking and fixing them. We have projects like GUAC, the AI cybersecurity challenge, and other OpenSSF efforts driving this part of the industry.

Another issue we saw was social engineering attacks. Open source is built on a human engineering fabric, so threats like the XZ Utils backdoor are a real concern. OpenSSF and OpenJS worked together to issue an alert on what needs to be done. Should we have trusted maintainers whom we’ve met in real life? These are important questions.

Supply chain attacks also continue to rise due to reliance on open source, particularly with government mandates requiring SBOMs to improve transparency and manage supply chains. OpenSSF is working on projects like Protobomb and BombCTL to simplify SBOM creation and portability.

Finally, regulatory pressures increased. The Cyber Resilience Act and the U.S. executive order on stricter open source compliance created unintended consequences for small businesses and open source communities. OpenSSF is working with the EU to ensure a balanced implementation that supports open source while keeping it secure.

Zach, what else would you add?

Zach Steindler (07:15.736)
That was a fantastic overview. I’ve spent much of my career on the defensive side of things in OpenSSF with supply chain security. It has been interesting to see how some of the capabilities we’ve developed have helped in incident response, such as build provenance in the Python package Ultraylitics compromise. That helped us understand what the attacker was doing and how to respond.

Going back to XZ Utils, I think a lot about how we can make the lives of open source maintainers easier in 2025. We ask a lot from them, and while we’re building new security capabilities, they shouldn’t add extra burdens. We must ensure security improvements come with usability improvements to make maintainers’ lives easier.

CRob (08:29.697)
Excellent points. Let’s talk about some things the foundation wants to collaborate on this year. We adopted a practice called MVVSR last year. Zach, maybe you could give an overview of what MVVSR is.

Zach Steindler (08:51.074)
OpenSSF is exiting an exciting early phase where we tried a lot of things to see what worked. Now, we’re borrowing practices from nonprofits and the business world to be more thoughtful about engagement. MVVSR stands for Mission, Vision, Values, Strategy, and Roadmap. It helps us define where we want the organization to go. The mission is high-level, perhaps on a 10-year timeline. The roadmap outlines immediate actions, spanning months or a year.

In late 2024, the OpenSSF TAC, Governance Committee, and Governing Board revised the MVVSR, focusing on strategy. We defined three key categories:

1. Catalyst for Change – Building tools for open source developers to meet security goals.
2. Educate & Empower the Modern Developer – Providing guides, courses, and best practices.
3. Ecosystem Leader – Developing standards and frameworks like Salsa for supply chain security.

CRob (13:13.505)
Awesome. Arun, you’re involved in various foundations. How important is having a roadmap for OpenSSF’s strategy?

Arun Gupta (13:41.486)
It’s critical. Success depends not just on creating guidelines but on their adoption by other foundations. OpenSSF’s mission is to improve open source security, but much of the work happens in other foundations like CNCF, Apache, and Eclipse. Our success is defined by how widely our recommendations are adopted.

For example, Kubernetes adopting OpenSSF recommendations is a big win. At Intel, we ran the OpenSSF Scorecard across all public GitHub repos, tracking incremental security improvements. These efforts align back to OpenSSF’s mission.

CRob (26:18.849)
We’ve accomplished a lot in 2024 and have exciting plans for 2025. Thank you both for your leadership, and thanks to our community of contributors for driving these projects forward. It’s amazing to see initiatives like Salsa and sigstore, which started over four years ago, continue to grow. Gentlemen, I appreciate your time today, and I look forward to working together in 2025. Thank you.

Arun Gupta (27:05.486)
Thank you so much.

Zach Steindler (27:05.72)
Thanks, CRob, pleasure to be here.

In this episode, CRob talks to Michael Winser, Technical Strategist for Alpha-Omega, an associated project of the OpenSSF that with open source software project maintainers to systematically find new, as-yet-undiscovered vulnerabilities in open source code – and get them fixed – to improve global software supply chain security.

• 01:00 – Michael shares his origin story into open source
• 02:09 – How Alpha-Omega came to be
• 03:48 Alpha-Omega’s mission is catalyzing sustainable security improvements
• 05:16 – The four types of investments Alpha-Omega makes to catalyze change
• 11:33 – Michael expands on his “clean the beach” approach to impacting open source security
• 16:41 – The 3F framework helps manage upstream dependencies effectively
• 21:13 – Michael answers CRob’s rapid-fire questions
• 23:06 – Michael’s advice to aspiring development and cybersecurity professionals
• 24:44 – Michael’s call to action for listeners

• Michael Winser on LinkedIn
• Alpha-Omega homepage
• OpenSSF on LinkedIn
• Subscribe to the OpenSSF newsletter
• Get involved with the OpenSSF community

Michael Winser soundbite (00:01)
When some nice, well-meaning person shows up from a project that you can trust, it becomes a more interesting conversation. With that mindset, fascinating things happen. And if you imagine that playing itself out again and again and again, it becomes cultural.

CRob (00:18)
Hello, everybody, I’m CRob. I do security stuff on the internet. I’m also a community leader and the chief architect for the Open Source Security Foundation. One of the coolest things I get to do with the foundation is to host the OpenSSF’s “What’s in the SOSS?” podcast. In the podcast, we talk to leaders, maintainers and interesting people within the open source security ecosystem. This week we have a real treat. We’re talking with my pal, Michael Winser, AKA “one of the Michaels” from the Alpha-Omega project. Michael, welcome sir.

Michael Winser (00:52)
It’s great to be with you, CRob.

CRob (00:53)
So for those of us that may not be aware of you, sir, could you maybe give us your open source origin story?

Michael Winser (01:00)
I have to think about that because there’s so many different sort of forays, but I think that the origin-origin story is in 1985, I was at my first job. You know, I got the Minix book and it came with floppy disks of source code to an entire operating system and all the tools. And I’m like, wait, I get to do this? And I started compiling stuff and then I started porting it to different things and using the code and then just seeing how it worked. That was like a life-changing sort of beginning.

And then I think then at Google working in open source, you know Google has a tremendous history of open source and a community and culture of it and embracing it. And I got to my last part of my work at Google was working on open source supply chain security for Google’s vast supply chain, both in terms of producing and consuming. And so that’s really been another phase of the journey for me.

CRob (01:53)
So I bet things have changed quite a lot back from 1985. And that’s not quite the beginning of everything. But speaking about beginnings and endings, you’re one of the leaders of a project called Alpha-Omega. Could you maybe tell us a little bit about that and kind of what AO is trying to do?

Michael Winser (02:09)
Sure. So Alpha-Omega, it started out in, sort of, two almost distinct things. One was at the sort of, that moment of crisis when OpenSSF was created and various companies like Microsoft and Google were like, we got to do something about this. And both Microsoft and Google sort of never let a good crisis go to waste, put a chunk of money aside to say, whatever we do, how do we figure this stuff out? It’s going to take some money to fix things. Let’s put some money in and figure out what we’ll do with it later.

Separately, Michael Scovetta had been thinking about the problem, had written a paper titled, surprisingly enough, Alpha-Omega, and thinking about how one might, the how one might was looking at the Alpha, which is sort of like the most significant, most critical projects that we can imagine. And then the Omega is, what about all the hundreds of thousands of other projects?

And so that confluence of those two thoughts sat unrealized, unfulfilled, until I…I joined the ghost team at Google and someone said, you should talk to this guy, Michael Scovetta. And that’s really how Alpha-Omega was started was two guys named Michael sitting in a room talking about what we might do. And there’s been a lot of evolution of the thinking and how to do it and lessons learned. And that’s what we’re here to talk about today, I think.

CRob (03:31)
I remember that paper quite well in the beginnings of the foundation. Thinking more broadly, how does one try to solve a problem with the open source software supply chain? From an AO perspective, how do you approach this problem?

Michael Winser (03:48)
There’s so many ways to this question, but I’m actually just going to start with summarizing our mission, because I think it really, we spend a lot of time, as you know, I’m a bit of a zealot on the mission, vision, strategy and roadmap thinking. And so our mission is to protect society by, critical word here, catalyzing sustainable security improvements to the most critical open source projects and ecosystems.

The words here are super important. Catalyzing. With whatever money we have on tap, it’s still completely inadequate to the scale of the problem we have, right? Like I jokingly like to sort of describe the software supply chain problem as sort of like Y2K, but without the same clarity of problem, solution or date.

It’s big, it’s deep, it’s poorly understood. So our goal is not to be sort of this magical, huge and permanent endowment to fix all the problems of the open source. And we’ll talk more about how it’s not about just putting money in there, right? But to catalyze change and to catalyze change towards sustainable security. And so the word sustainable shows up in all the conversations and it is really two sides of the same coin. when we talk about security and sustainability, they’re almost really the same thing.

CRob (05:03)
You mentioned money is a potential solution sometimes, but maybe could you talk about some of the techniques to try to achieve some better security outcomes with the projects you’ve worked with?

Michael Winser (05:16)
Some of it was sort of historically tripping over things and trying them out, right? And I think that was a key thing for us. But where we’ve arrived, I think I’ll sort of rather than trying to tell all the origin stories of all the different strategies that we’ve evolved. Actually, I’ll summarize by, so Alpha-Omega has now come to mean, not the most critical projects and then the rest, but the highest points of leverage and then scalable solutions. And so I use those two words, Alpha effectively means leverage and Omega means scale. And in that context, we’ve developed essentially a four pronged strategy, four kinds of investment that we make to create change, to catalyze change.

And in no particular order, Category A is essentially staffing engagements at organizations that are able to apply that kind of leverage and to where adding somebody whose job it is to worry about security can have that kind of impact. It’s kind of crazy how when you make it someone’s job to worry about security, you elevate something from a tragedy to the commons where it’s everybody’s job and nobody’s job, nobody’s the expert, nobody can decide anything to something where, well, that person said we should do X, I guess we’re gonna do X, whatever X was.

And then having somebody whose job it is to say, okay, with all the thousands of security problems we have, we’re gonna tackle these two this year, and developing that kind of theme, and then working with all those humans to create a culture around that change. Again, if it’s someone’s job to do so, it’s more likely to happen than if there’s nobody’s job it is to do it. Category A, staffing engagements at significant open source organizations that have the both the resources to hire somebody and the leverage to have that person become effective. Right? And so there’s a lot of like packaged up in that resources to hire someone like, you know, they, like, humans are humans. They want to have, you know, jobs, benefits, promotions, other crazy stuff. Right? I’ve given up on all those things, but you know, that’s the world that people live in.

And we, we don’t want to be an employer, we want to be a catalyst, right? And so we’re not here to sort of create a giant organization of open source security. We’re here to cause other people to get there and ultimately to wean themselves from us and to have a sustainable model around that. And in fact, so for those grants, we encourage, we discuss, we ask, how are you diversifying your funding so that you can start supporting this as a line item on your normal budget as opposed to our sort of operational thing? And that’s, it’s a journey. So that’s category A.

Category B has some interesting overlap, but it really speaks to what I think of as the app stores of software development, the package ecosystems, right? There is no greater force on the internet than a developer working at some company with their boss is breathing down their neck and they’ve got a thing to get done. They got to get tab A into slot B. They can’t figure it out. They Google something, and it says do not use this code, it is terrible, you should not use it, but if you were to use it, npm install foo will get you tab A into slot B, right?

At this point, you can’t give them enough warnings, it doesn’t matter, they’re under pressure, they need to get something done, they’re installing foo, right? How can we elevate these package ecosystems so that organizations, individuals, publishers, consumers can all have better metadata, better security practices, and trust the statements that these packages are making about themselves and that other entities are making about these packages to start making informed decisions or even policy-based decisions about what is allowed or not allowed into a developer environment in some organization, right?

And then that’s just a tiny part of it. So like the whole package app store concept where you essentially, I am installing this thing and I expect some truths about that name to be not a name name-squatted thing. I expect the versions to be reasonably accurate about not being changed underneath me. And a thousand little things that we just want to take for granted, even without worrying about them somehow making it all be secure, is such a point of leverage and criticality that we find investing in that worthwhile. And so that’s a category for us.

Category C is actually where most of our conversations start. And perhaps I’m getting ahead of our conversation, but it’s with audits. And we love paying for audits into an organization that essentially is ready to have an audit done. And there’s so much that gets wrapped up in is an organization ready to have an audit? Do they want to have the audit? What are they going to do with the audits results? How do they handle?

And so as an early engagement, it’s remarkably cost-effective to like find out whether that organization is an entire giant, complicated ecosystem of thousands of projects and things like that, or three to five amazing hackers who work nights and weekends on some really important library. That audit tells everybody an awful lot about where that project is on their journey of security. And one of our underlying principles about doing grants is make us want to do it again. And how an organization responds to that audit is a very key indicator, whether they’re ready for more, could they handle it, what are they going to do with it, et cetera.

And then category D, you could name it almost anything you want. This is us embracing the deep truth that we have no idea what we are doing. Collectively as an industry, nobody knows what we’re doing in this space. It’s hard, right? And so this is an area where we think of it as experimentation and innovation. And it’s a grab bucket for things that we try to do. And one of our stakeholders pointed out that we weren’t failing often enough early on in our life cycle. And it was like, if you’re not trying enough things, you’re taking the easy money, easy bets and not learning important lessons. Like, okay, we’re gonna screw some things up, get ready!

Again, the journey of learning every step along the way. And it’s not like we are like, recklessy throwing money to see if you can just burn it into security that doesn’t work — we tried But we’re seeing you know, see what we can do and those lessons are fun, too.

CRob (11:16)
Excellent. So in parallel with your kind of your four strategies you’ve used you you and I have talked a lot about your concept of the “clean the beach.” Could you maybe talk a little bit more about your idea of cleaning the beach?

Michael Winser (11:33)
Absolutely. So one of our early engagements on the Omega side was to work with an organization called OpenRefactory that had developed some better than generic static analysis techniques. And I don’t even know how it works, and there’s probably some human that know there’s some humans in the loop to help manage the false positives and false negatives and things like that. They felt that they could scale this up to handle thousands of projects to go off and scan the source code to look for vulnerabilities previously not found in that source code. And then also to generate patches, pull requests for fixes to those things as well.

And this is, sort of, the of the holy grail dream of like, we’ve got all this problem, if only we just, we can just turn literally oil into energy into compute, into fixing all this stuff, right? And there’s a lot of interesting things along the way there. So the first time they did, they went and did a scan, 3,000 projects, and came back and said, look at us, we scanned 3,000 projects, we found I don’t know how many vulnerabilities, we reported this many, this many were accepted. There’s a conversation there that we should get back to about the humans in the loop. And after it, I’m like, okay, if I try to tell anybody about this work, I don’t know what difference it makes to anybody’s lives.

And I realized that it was the moral equivalent of taking a…some kind of boat, maybe a rowboat, maybe a giant barge, out to the Pacific garbage patch and picking up a lot of plastic and coming back and saying, look at all this plastic I brought back. And I’m like, that’s good. And maybe you’ve developed a technique for getting plastic at scale, but thousands of orders of magnitude off, like literally it’s gigatons, teratons of stuff out there. And you brought back a little bit. I’m like, I need to be more short-term in terms of getting work and impact. And we care about continuous results and learnings as opposed to like, great, we found a way to turn the next trillion dollars into like a lot of scans and things like that. And so we thought about this a lot.

And it was sort of around the same time as the somewhat terrifying XZ situation, right? And I realized that XZ showed us a lot about the frailty of projects because of the humanness of people involved. But it also showed us that, and I’m going to be kind of stern about this, open source projects that use upstream dependencies like XZ are treating those dependencies exactly the way that we complain about corporations using open source for free.

They assume that this source code is being taken care of by somebody else and that it comes down from the sky on a platter with unicorns and rainbows and whatever other…like how many people in these organizations that use XZ, whether they were for-profit entities or whatever we’re paying attention upstream and saying, hey, I wonder if any of our projects needs our help? I wonder if we should spend some more time working on our upstream. Said nobody ever.

And so coincidentally, we wanted to do some work with someone we met at PyCon, this gentleman named Jarek Potiuk who’s on the PMC for Apache Airflow. And he wanted us to talk about our security work at the Airflow conference. And I’m like, well, we’ve got to talk about something. And so we start talking about Airflow. And he was already down that road of looking at his dependencies and trying to analyze them a little bit. And we said, what can we do here?

And so bring this back to Pacific garbage patch, right? We’d all love for the Pacific garbage patch to go away, right? But day to day, we go to the beach. And wouldn’t it be nice if we could talk about a section of the beach as being not perfectly okay, but free of a common set of risks, right? So we thought about, so can we do that? And he’s like, well, I know exactly how many dependencies total Airflow has. It has 719 dependencies.

And we asked ourselves the question, has anybody ever done a complete audit across those dependencies? Where complete is across all 719, not a complete code analysis of every single piece of those projects. And the answer was no. And we said, well, we’re going to make the answer yes. And so we started a project to go and bring automatic scanning to that so that OpenRefactory instead of trying to scan 3,000 arbitrary projects or the top 3,000 or the top 3,000 dependencies, they pick 718 and scan those. And Jarek and his team put together some scripts to go off and pull key facts about projects that can be used to assess risk on an ongoing basis in terms of whether we need to get involved or should we do something or should we worry about this or not, right?

And it’s everything from understanding the governance to the size of the contribution pool to the project, to its vulnerability history, right? And just building up a picture where the goal is not to sort of audit the source code of each of these projects, because that’s actually not Airflow’s job, right? And they wouldn’t do a good job of it per se. But to understand across their dependencies where there is risk and where they might need to do something about it.

From that came another concept that is what I really like. Going back to the, let’s not pretend that this code came down from the sky on a silver platter with unicorns. What are we supposed to do about it if we see risk in one of our upstream dependencies? And from that, the framework that came out was essentially the three F’s. You either need to fix, fork or forego those dependencies. There’s another way of saying forego, but we’ll stick with forego. There’s a fourth one which is fund, and we’ll talk about why that is not actually something at the disposal of most projects.

The fixed part is kind of interesting. The fork part is an expensive decision. It’s saying, you know, they’re not doing it, but we need this and we can’t get something else. We can’t forego it because it’s whatever. So I guess it’s ours now, right? And taking responsibility for the code that you use, because every dependency you use, right, unless you’re using some very sophisticated sandboxing, every dependency you use has basically total access to your build environment and total access to your production environment. So it’s your code, it’s your responsibility.

So with that mindset, fascinating things happened. When an automated scan from OpenRefactory found a new vulnerability in one of the dependencies, they would report it through their private vulnerability reporting, or we had some editing that noticed that these people don’t have private vulnerability reporting.

And so one of the fixes was helping them turn on PBR, right? But let’s say they had PBR, they would file the fix or file the vulnerability. And because it looked like it came from a machine, right? Unfortunately, open source maintainers have been overwhelmed by well-meaning people with bots and a desire to become a security researcher with a lot of like, let’s just say, not the most important vulnerabilities on the planet.

And that’s a lot of signal-to-noise for them to deal with. So some of these reports were getting ignored, but then when an Apache Airflow maintainer would show up on the report and say, hey, my name is “Blah,” I’m from Apache, we depend upon you, would you be open to fixing this vulnerability, we would really greatly appreciate it. In other words, a human shows up and behave like a human. You’d be amazed at what happened. People are like, my God, you know I exist? You’re from Apache Airflow, I heard it, you guys. How can I help? I’ll put it right on like that, right? Like, the response changed dramatically. And that’s a key lesson, right?

And if I were to describe one of my goals for this sort of continued effort, right, is that within the Airflow community, there’s an adopt a dependency mindset where there’s somebody, at least one person for every dependency. And I mean, transitively, it’s not the top level. It’s the whole graph, because you can’t assume that your transitive people are behaving the same way as you and that. It’s easy when it’s like not a crisis, but when it’s a crisis, right?

Having somebody you know, talk to you about the situation, offer to help is very different than, oh my God, you’ve shown up on somebody’s radar as having a critical vulnerability and now everybody is dog is asking you about this. Lawyer-grams are coming. We’ve seen that pattern, right? But then Jarek from Apache Airflow shows up and says, hey, Mary, sorry you’re under the stress. We’re actually keen to help you as well. You know, who’s going to say no to that kind of help when it’s somebody they already know? Whereas the XZ situation has effectively taught people to say, I don’t know you, why am I letting you into my project? How do I know you’re not some hacker from some bad actor, right?

That mindset of let’s pick some beaches to focus on, understand the scope of that, and then take that 3F mindset, right? And so Airflow has changed their security roadmap for 2025 and that includes doing work with, on behalf for, towards their dependencies. They’ve taken some dependencies out, so they’ve done it forego. And some of the things they’re asking them to do is just turn on PDR or maybe do some branch protection, some of the things that you might describe in the open SSF space line for security, right?

That people don’t think they know they’re competent to do or haven’t worried about it yet or whatever. But when some nice, well-meaning person shows up from a project that you can trust, it becomes a more interesting conversation. And if you imagine that playing itself out again and again and again, it becomes cultural.

CRob (21:01)
Yeah, that’s amazing. Thank you for sharing. That’s some amazing insights. Well, let’s move on to the rapid fire section of podcast! First hard question. Spicy or mild food?

Michael Winser (21:13)
Oh, I think both. Like I don’t want to have spicy every single day, but I do enjoy a nice spicy pad Thai or something like that or whatever. I’m, you know, variety is the spice of life. So there you go.

CRob (21:25)
Excellent. Fair enough. Very contentious question: Vi or Emacs?

Michael Winser (21:32)
I confess to Vi as my default console editor. Along back in that 1985 time, did port Jove — Jonathan’s Own Version of Emacs. Still alive today. I used that. And then, in my Microsoft days, I used this tool called Epsilon that was an OS2 and DOS Emacs-derived editor. And the key bindings are all locked in my brain and worked really well. But then full-grown Emacs became available to me, and the key bindings were actually nuancedly different, and my brain skid off the tracks. And then as I became a product manager, the need became more casual, and so Vi has become just convenient enough. I still use the index key bindings on the Mac OS command line to move around.

CRob (21:19)
Oh, very nice. What’s your favorite adult beverage?

Michael Winser (22:23)
I think it’s beer. It really is.

CRob (22:25)
Beer’s great. A lot of variety, a lot of choices.

Michael Winser (22:28)
I think a good hefeweizen, a wheat beer, would be very nice.

CRob (22:23)
Okay, and our last most controversial question: tabs or spaces?

Michael Winser (22:39)
Oh, spaces. (Laughter) I’m not even like, like I am a pretty tolerant person, but there’s just no way it ends well with tabs.

CRob (22:50)
(Laughter) Fair enough, sir. Well, thank you for playing rapid fire. And as we close down, what advice do you have for someone that’s new or trying to get into this field today of development or cybersecurity?

Michael Winser (23:06)
The first piece of advice I would have is it’s about human connections, right? Like so much of what we do is about transparency and trust, right? Transparency happens, things that happen in the open and trust is about behaving in ways that cause people to want to do things with you again, right? There’s a predictability to trust too, in terms of like not doing randomly weird things and things like that.

And so, and then there’s also, you know, trust is built through shared positive experiences or non-fatal outcomes of challenges. So I think that anybody wanting to get into this space, showing up as a human being, being open about who you are and what you’re trying to do, and getting to know the people, and that sort of journey of humility of listening to people who you might think you know more than they do and you might even be right, but it’s their work as well. And so listening to them along the way, that’s personally one of my constant challenges. I’m an opinionated person with a lot of things to say. Really, it’s true.

It’s very generic guidance. I think that if you want to just get started, it’s pretty easy. Pick something you know anything about, show up there in some project and listen, learn, ask questions and then find some way to help. Taking notes in a working group meeting, it’s a pretty powerful way to build trust in terms of, this person seems to take notes that accurately represent what we tried to say in this conversation. In fact, better than what we said. We trust this person to represent our thoughts is a pretty powerful first step.

CRob (24:32)
Excellent. I really appreciate you sharing that. And to close, what call to action do you have for our listeners? What would you like them to take away or do after they listen to this podcast?

Michael Winser (24:44)
I would like them to apply the 3F framework to their upstream dependencies. I would like them to look at their dependencies as if they were a giant pile of poorly understood risk and not just through the lens of how many vulnerabilities do I have unpatched in my current application because of some, you know SBOM analyzing tool telling me. But from a longer-term organizational and human risk perspective, go look at your dependencies and their dependencies and their dependencies and build up just a heat map of where you think you should go off and apply that 3F framework.

And if you truly feel like you can’t do any one of those things, right, because you’re not competent to go fix or fork and you have no choice but to use the thing so you can’t forego it, right, then think about funding somebody who can.

CRob (25:34)
Excellent words of wisdom. Michael, thank you for your time and all of your contributions through your history and now through the Alpha and Omega projects. So we really appreciate you stopping by today.

Michael Winser (25:45)
It was my pleasure and thank you for having me. I’ve enjoyed this tremendously. It would be a foolish thing for me to let this conversation end without mentioning the three people at Alpha-Omega who really, without whom we’d be nowhere, right? And so, you know, Bob Callaway, Michael Scovetta, and Henri Yandell. And then there’s a support crew of other people as well, without whom we wouldn’t get anything done, right?

I get to be, in many ways, the sort of first point of contact and the loud point of contact. We also have Mila from Amazon, and we have Michelle Martineau and Tracy Li, who are our LF people. And again, this is what makes it work for us, is that we can get things done. I get to be the sort of loud face of it, but there’s a really great team of people whose wisdom is critical to how we make decisions.

CRob (26:32)
That’s amazing. We have a community helping the community. Thank you.

Michael Winser (26:35)
Thank you.

Announcer (26:37)
Like what you’re hearing? Be sure to subscribe to What’s in the SOSS? on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, AntennaPod, Pocket Casts or wherever you get your podcasts. There’s lots 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 dot 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 dot org slash get involved. Thanks for listening, and we’ll talk to you next time on What’s in the SOSS?

CRob discusses package repository security with two people who know a lot about the topic. Zach Steindler is a principal engineer at Github, a member of the OpenSSF TAC and co-chairs the OpenSSF Security Packages Repository Working Group. Jack Cable is a senior technical advisor at CISA. Earlier this year, Zach and Jack published a helpful guide of best practices entitled “Principles for Package Repository Security.”

• 00:48 – Jack and Zach share their backgrounds
• 02:59 – What package repositories are and why they’re important to open source users
• 04:17 – The positive impact package security has on downstream users
• 07:06 – Jack and Zach offer insight into the Prinicples for Package Repository Security
• 11:18 – Future endeavors of the Securing Software Repositories Working Group
• 17:32 – Jack and Zach answer CRob’s rapid-fire questions
• 19:31 – Advice for those entering the industry
• 21:28 – Jack and Zach share their calls to action

• Zach Steindler on LinkedIn
• Jack Cable on LinkedIn
• OpenSSF on LinkedIn
• Securing Package Repositories Working Group
• Principles for Package Repository Security document
• Subscribe to the OpenSSF newsletter
• Get involved with the OpenSSF community

Zach Steindler soundbite (00:01)
We absolutely are not looking to go in and say, OK all ecosystems must do X. But what we are is sort of this forum where these conversations can take place. People who operate these package repositories can say here’s what’s working for us, here’s what’s not working for us. Share those ideas, share those experiences and learn from each other.

CRob (00:017)
Hello everybody, I’m CRob. I do security stuff on the internet and I’m also a community leader within the OpenSSF. And one of the fun things I get to do is talk to amazing people that have input and are developing and working within upstream open source.

And today we have a real treat. I have two amazing people. I have Zach and Jack, and they’re here to talk to us a little bit about package repository security. So before we start, could I ask each of you to maybe give us a brief introduction?

Jack Cable (00:48)
Great. Thank you so much for having us on here, CRob. I am Jack Cable. I’m a senior technical advisor at CISA, where I help lead our agency’s work around open source software security and secure by design. For those unfamiliar with CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is the nation’s cyber defense agency. So we help to protect both the federal civilian government and critical infrastructure, of which there’s 16 sectors ranging from everything like water to power, financial services, healthcare, and so on. And probably as no surprise to anyone here, all of these sectors are heavily dependent on open source software, which is why we’re so eager about seeing how we can really be proactive in protecting the open source ecosystem.

I come from a background in security research, software development, spent some time doing bug bounty programs, finding vulnerabilities in companies. Gradually went over to the policy side of things, spent some time, for instance, in the Senate where I worked on legislation related to open source software security and then joined CISA about a year and a half ago.

CRob (02:04)
Awesome. Zach?

Zach Steindler (02:13.869)
Yeah, CRob, thanks so much for having us. My name is Zach Steindler. I’m a principal engineer at GitHub. I have a really amazing job that lets me work on open source supply chain security, both for GitHub’s enterprise customers, but also for the open source ecosystem. CRob, you and I are both on the OpenSSF TAC. And in addition to that, I co-chair the Securing Software Repositories Working Group, where we had a recent chance to collaborate with us on the Principles for Package Repository Security document.

CRob (02:40)
Excellent, which we will talk about in just a few moments. And, you know, thank you both for your past, current and future contributions to open source. We really appreciate it. So our first question. Would you tell us what a package repository is and why that’s something that’s important to open source users?

Zach Steindler (02:59)
Yeah, this is something that comes up a lot in the working group, and what we’ve discovered is that everyone has slightly different terminology that they prefer to use. Here when we’re talking about package repositories, we’re talking about systems like NPM, like PyPI, like RubyGems or Homebrew — places that people are going to download software that they then run on their machine. And that’s a little bit in contrast to other terminology you might hear around repositories.

So here we aren’t talking about, like, where you store your source code like in a Git repository or a Mercurial repository, that sort of thing. These patch repositories are widely used. Many of them serve hundreds of millions to billions of downloads per day, and those downloads are being run on developer’s machines that are being run on build servers, and they’re being run on people’s computers who, know, whatever you’re doing on your mobile phone or your desktop device. And so the software that’s stored in these package repositories are really used globally by almost everyone daily.

CRob (04:07)
Thinking about kind of this critical space within critical software here, how does improving a package repository security affect all the downstream folks from that?

Jack Cable (04:17)
Great. And really to what Zach was saying, that’s in part why we picked this as a priority area at CISA, recognizing that regardless, really, of what, say, critical infrastructure sector, regardless of whether you’re a small business, whether you’re a large company, whether you’re a government agency, you’re heavily dependent on open source software. And in all likelihood, that software is being integrated into the products you’re using through a package repository.

So we wanted to see, where are the places where we can have the biggest potential impact when it comes to security and package repositories really stood out as central points where virtually everyone who consumes open source software goes to download, to integrate that software. So it is very central to essentially all of the software that our world relies on today. And we also recognize that many of these package repositories themselves are resource constrained, often nonprofits who operate these really critical essential services, surveying millions of developers, billions of users across the world.

So what kind of can be done to help strengthen their security? Because we’ve seen attacks both on package repositories themselves, whether it’s compromising developers’ accounts or kind of some of these underlying pervasive flaws in open source packages. How can package repositories really bolster their security to make the entire open source ecosystem more resilient? And that’s what we set out, which I know we’ll get much more into the principles of package repository security framework we created. But the goal is to really aggregate some of the best practices that perhaps one or two package repositories are doing today, but we’re not seeing across the board.

Things that can be as basic, for instance, as requiring multifactor authentication for developers of really critical projects to make sure that that developer’s account is much harder to compromise. So some of these actions that we know take time and resources to implement and we want to see how we can help package repositories prioritize these actions, advocate for them, get funding to do them so that we can all benefit.

CRob (06:52)
Well, we’ve touched on it a few times already. Let’s talk about the Principles of the Package Repository Security. Could maybe you share a little bit about what this document’s about, how it came to be, and maybe a little bit about who helped collaborate to do it?

Jack Cable (07:06)
I’ll kick it off, and then Zach can jump in. So really, as I was saying, we wanted to create kind of a common set of best practices that any package repository could look to to kind of guide their future actions, Because, kind of, what we’ve been seeing, and I’m sure Zach can get much more into it with the work he’s led through the Securing Software Repositories Working Group, is that there’s many software repositories that do care significantly about security that really are taking a number of steps that, like we’ve seen for instance, both Python and PM requiring multi-factor authentication for their maintainers, Python even, shipping security tokens to their developers. Some of these actions that really have the potential to strengthen security.

So what the Principles for Package Repository Security Framework is, is really an aggregation of these security practices that we developed over the course of a few months collaboratively, both between CISA, Securing Software Repositories Working Group, and then many package repositories, and landed on a set of four buckets really around security best practices, including areas like authentication, authorization.

How are these package repositories, for instance, enforcing multi-factor authentication? What tiers of maturity might go into this to then, for instance, if they have a command line interface utility, how can that make security really seamless for developers who are integrating packages?

Say, if there is no vulnerabilities in those packages, is that at least flagged to the developer so they can make an informed decision around whether or not to integrate the version of the open source package they’re looking at? So maybe I’ll pass it over to Zach to cover what I missed

Zach Steindler (09:08)
Yeah, the beauty of open source is that no one’s in charge. And people sometimes misunderstand the Securing Software Repositories Working Group, and they’re like, can I come to that and, sort of like, mandate all the package repositories implement MFA? And the answer is no, you can’t, first because it’s against the purpose of the group to like tell people what to do. But also, it’s not a policy-making group. It’s not a mandate-creating group, right? Participation is voluntary.

Even if we were to, you know, issue a mandate, each of these ecosystems has like a rich history of why they’ve developed certain capabilities, things they can and cannot do, things that are easy for them, things that are hard. So we absolutely are not looking to go in and say, OK, you know, all ecosystems must do X. But what we are is sort of this forum where these conversations take place.

People who operate these package repositories can say, here’s what’s working for us, here’s what’s not working for us. Share those ideas, share those experiences and learn from each other. And so when it came to writing the Principles for Package Repository Security document, the goal was not to say, here’s what you must do, but these different ecosystems are all very busy, very resource constrained. And one of the items often on their backlog is to create a security road map or to put together a request for funding for like a full time security in residence position. But to do that, they need to have some idea of what that person is going to work on.

And that’s really where the principles document comes in, is where we’re creating this maturity model, this roadmap, whatever you want to call it, more as a menu that you can order off of and not a mandate that everyone must follow.

CRob (10:50)
That sounds like a really smart approach. I applaud your group for taking that tactic. The artifact itself is available today. You can go out and review it and maybe start adopting a thing or two in there if you manage repository, but also it took you a lot of time and effort to get there. But describe to us what’s next on your roadmap. Where does what does the future hold around your group and the idea around trying to institute some better security practices across repos?

Zach Steindler (11:18)
Yeah, I could start out to talk about the Securing Software Repositories Working Group. I’m not sure I would have had this grand plan at the time, but overtime it sort of crystallized that the purpose of the working group is to put together roadmaps like the principles document that we published. I gotta plug that all the work that we do is on repos.openssf.org. So it’s a great place to review all these documents.

The second thing that the working group is focused on, other than just being this venue where people can have these conversations, is to take the individual security capabilities and publish specific guidance on how an ecosystem implemented it, and then give sort of a design and security overview to make it easier for other ecosystems to also implement that capability. We have a huge success story here with a capability called Trusted Publishing.

So to take a step back, the point of Trusted Publishing is that when you are building your software on a build server and you need to get it to the package registry, you have to authenticate that you have the permission to publish that package namespace. Usually in the past, this has been done by taking someone’s user account and taking their password and storing it in the build pipeline. Maybe you could use an API key instead, but these are really juicy targets for hackers.

So Trusted Publishing is a way to use the workload identity of the build system to authorize the publish. And then you don’t have a API key that can be exfiltrated and broadly used to upload a lot of malicious content. And so this capability was first implemented in PyPI, shortly thereafter in RubyGems.

And then we asked Seth Larson, who’s a member of the working group and the Python Software Foundation security residents to write up implementation guidance based on what his team at the PSF learned and also based on what the RubyGems team learned. And it so happened that NuGet, the package manager for the dot net Microsoft ecosystem, was also interested in this capability, and the timing just just happened to work out perfectly where they started coming to the working group meetings.

We already had this drafted guidance on implementation, and they were able to take that and kind of accelerate their RFC process, adapt it so that it was relevant to the different concerns in their ecosystem. But they’re much further along on this track of implementing this capability than they would have otherwise been if they had to start a square one. So in addition to roadmaps, I think we’re going to be focusing more in the near future on finding more of these security capabilities to publish guidance on to help the package repositories learn from each other.

Jack Cable (14:08)
Yep, and just to add on to that, I think it’s super great to see some of the work that is coming out of the working group. We at CISA held a summit on open source software security in March, whereas part of that we announced actions that five of the major package repositories, including for Python, JavaScript, Rust, Java and PHP are taking in line with the principles for package repository security framework. And we know that this is going to be an ongoing journey for really all of the package repositories, but we’re encouraged to see alignment behind that. And we hope that can be a helpful resource for these package repositories to put together their roadmaps to make funding requests and so on.

But I do want to talk about kind of one of the broader outcomes that we want to help achieve at CISA, and this is in line with our secure design initiative, really where we want technology manufacturers to start taking ownership of, for instance, the security outcomes of their customers, because we know that they’re the ones who are best positioned to help drive down the constant stream of cyber attacks that we seem to be seeing.

As part of that, it’s essential that every technology manufacturer who is a consumer of open source software who integrates that into their products, who profits from that open source software is a responsible steward of the open source software that they depend upon. That means both having processes to responsibly consume that. It also means contributing back to those open source packages, whether financially or through developer time.

But what this also entails is making sure that there’s kind of a healthy ecosystem of the infrastructure supporting the open source communities of which package repositories are really a core part. So I encourage every software manufacturer to think about how they are helping to sustain these package repositories, helping to foster security improvements, because again, we know that many of these are nonprofits. They really do rely on their consumers to help sustain them, not just for security, but for operations more generally. So really we want to see how both we can help spur some of these developments directly, but then also how every company can help contribute to sustain this.

Zach Steindler (16:50)
Jack, I just wanted to say that we are sort of like maybe dancing around the elephant in the room, which is that a lot of this work is done by volunteers. Occasionally it is funded. I wanted to give a special shout out to Alpha-Omega, which is an associated project of the OpenSSF that has funded some of this work in individual package repositories. There’s also the Sovereign Tech Fund, which is funded by, I think, two different elements in the German government.

But, you know, this work doesn’t happen by itself. And part of the reason why we’re putting together this guidance, why we’re putting together these roadmaps is so that when funding is available, we’re making sure that we are conscious of where we can get the most results from that investment.

CRob (17:32)
Thank you both for your efforts in trying to help lead this, help make this large change across our whole ecosystem. Huge amount of downstream impact these types of efforts are going to have. But let’s move on to the rapid fire section of our interview. (Sound effect: Rapid fire!) I have a couple of fun questions. We’re going to start off easy, spicy or mild food?

Jack Cable (17:55)
Spicy.

Zach Steindler (17:57)
In the area that I live, there’s quite a scale of what spicy to mild means, depending on what kind of restaurant that you’re at. I’d say I tend towards spicy, though.

CRob (18:05)
(Sound effect: Oh, that’s spicy!) That’s awesome. All right. A harder question. Vi or Emacs?

Jack Cable (18:16)
I’m going to say nano — option number three.

CRob (18:20)
(Laughter) Also acceptable.

Zach Steindler (18:24)
CRob, always joking about college football rivalries, and I don’t feel a strong personal investment in my text editor. I do happen to use Vi most of the time.

CRob (18:37)
It is a religion in some parts of the community. So, that was a very diplomatic answer. Thank you, Another equally contentious issue, tabs or spaces?

Jack Cable (18:48)
Spaces all the way, two spaces.

Zach Steindler (18:52)
I’m also on team spaces, but I’ve had to set up my Go formatter and linter to make sure that it gets things just right for the agreed-upon ecosystem answer. That’s the real answer, right? It’s good tools, and everyone can be equally upset at the choices that the linter makes

CRob (19:09)
That’s phenomenal. (Sound effect: The sauce is the boss!) I want to thank you two for playing along real quickly there. And as we close out, let’s think about, again, continuing on my last question about the future. What advice do either of you have for folks entering the industry today, whether they’re going to be an open source developer maintainer, they’re into cybersecurity, they’re just trying to help out what advice do you have for them?

Jack Cable (19:31)
I can kick that off. I’d say first of all, I think there’s lots of great areas and community projects to get involved with, particularly in the open source space. The beauty of that, of course, is that everything is out there and you can read up on it, you can use it, you can start contributing to it. And specifically from the security perspective, And there is a real ability to make a difference because as Zach was saying, this is primarily volunteers who are doing this, not because they’re going to make a lot of money from it or because they’re going to get a ton of recognition for it necessarily, but because they can make an actual difference.

And we know that this is sorely needed. We know that the security of open source software is only going to become more and more important. And it’s up to all of us really to step in and take matters into our own hands and drive these necessary improvements. So I think you’ll find that people are quite welcoming, that there’s a lot of great areas to get involved and encourage reading up on what’s going on and seeing what areas appeal to you most and start contributing.

Zach Steindler (20:51)
I have two pieces of maybe contradicting advice, because the two failure modes that I see are people being too afraid to start participating or being like, I have to be an expert before I start participating, which is absolutely not the case. And then the other failure mode I see is people joining a 10-year old project and being like, I have all the answers. I know what’s going on. So I think my contradictory advice would be to show up. And when you do show up, listen.

CRob (21:19)
Excellent advice. I think it’s not that big a contradiction. As we close out, do you gentlemen have a call to action? I think I might know part of it.

Zach Steindler (21:28)
Yeah, my call to action would be please go to repos.openssf.org. That is where we publish all of our content. That also links to our GitHub repository where you can then find our past meeting minutes, upcoming meeting information, our Slack channel in the OpenSSF Slack. Do be aware, I guess, that we’re very much the blue hats defenders here. So sometimes people like, do you need me to, you know, report more script kiddies uploading, you malware to NPM? It’s like.

The folks who are sort of like operating these systems, and so we recognize it’s a small audience. That’s not to say that we don’t want input from the broader public. We absolutely do, but to my point earlier, you know a lot of these folks have been running these systems for a decade plus. And so do come, but do be do be cognizant that there’s probably a lot of context that these operators have that that you may not have as a user systems.

Jack Cable (22:17)
And please do check out the principles for package repository security framework. It’s on GitHub as well as the website Zach mentioned. We have an open ticket where you can leave feedback, comments, suggestions, changes. We’re very much open to new ideas, hearing how we can make this better, how we can continue iterating and how we can start to foster more adoption.

CRob (22:43)
Excellent. I want to thank Zach and Jack for joining us today, helping secure kind of the engine that most people interact with open source with. So thank you all. I appreciate your time and thanks for joining us on What’s in the SOSS? (Sound effect: That’s saucy!)

Zach Steindler (23:00)
Thanks for having us, CRob. I’m a frequent listener, and it’s an honor to be here.

Jack Cable (23:04 )
Thank you, CRob.

Announcer (23:05)
Like what you’re hearing? Be sure to subscribe to What’s in the SOSS? on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, AntennaPod, Pocket Casts or wherever you get your podcasts. There’s lots 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/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/getinvolved. Thanks for listening, and we’ll talk to you next time on What’s in the SOSS?

In this episode, CRob talks to Rodrigo Freire, Red Hat’s chief architect. They discuss high-profile incidents and vulnerability management in the open source community. Rodrigo has a distinguished track record of success and experience in several industries, especially high-performance and mission-critical environments in financial services.

• 01:08 – Rodrigo shares his entry into open source
• 02:42 – Diving into the specifics of a high-profile incident
• 06:22 – How security researchers coordinate a response to a high-profile incident
• 10:33 – The benefits of a vulnerability disclosure program
• 11:57 – Rodgiro answers CRob’s rapid-fire questions
• 13:43 – Advice for anyone getting into the industry
• 14:26 – Rodrigo’s call to action for listeners
• 15:53 – The importance of the security community working together

• Rodrigo Freire on LinkedIn
• Rodrigo’s blog on Red Hat’s response to the XZ incident discovery
• Get involved with the OpenSSF community

Rodgrigo Freire soundbite (00:01)
Who do I ask and to grab by the arm? Man, I need you to, right now, please assess this vulnerability! It’s very important asset to have that Rolodex of contacts and to know the ones to ask for help. You don’t have to the information — have to know who knows.

CRob (00:18)
Hello everybody. Welcome to What’s in the SOSS? The OpenSSF’s podcast where I and Omkhar get to talk to some amazing people in the open source community. Today, I’ve got a really amazing treat for you. Very special guest. My friend Rodrigo from Red Hat. I’ve known Rodrigo for awhile, and we’re here to talk to about a really important topic, kind of, both of us have worked a lot with.

Rodrigo Freire (00:44)
Thanks Chris. Hello. Yes, I had the pleasure to work with CRob for a good number of years and I was in charge of the vulnerability management team at Red Hat. Yes, it was five definitely fun and character-molding years.

CRob (01:01)
So maybe you could share with our audience a little bit about your open source origin story. How did you get into this amazing space?

Rodrigo Freire (01:08)
It’s funny. When you say that I worked with a Linux version 1 dot something, well that pretty much disclosed the age, right? It was back in the 90s. I was working on an internet service provider and there was that multi-port serial adapters for moldings, and that was pretty much the backbone of the ISP. And then sendmail, ISC buying DNS server. And back in the day there was not radios for authentication — it was Cisco stack hacks, so yeah. (Laughter)

I started on the classic ISP admin back in the 90s. That’s when I got involved and then worked in the Brazilian government promoting the open source, and it was interesting time. When the government was shifting from mainframes and going to the to the low platform. And then the Linux as a security thing, and then the Linux was more focused on performance and the security. So this is where I started to wetting my toes in open source software.

CRob (02:22)
So let’s dive into the meat of our conversation today, my friend. We’ve all seen them, and maybe you could share with the audience from your perspective — what is a high profile incident? You know, sometimes it’s called celebrity vulnerability or a branded flaw. Could you maybe share like what is that?

Rodrigo Freire (10:33)
Yeah, definitely. I don’t know how does that translate to English actually. So I live all the way down here in Brazil, but I like to perceive them as like creating commotion. So that’s going to attract media audience and Twitter clicks and engagement and, h my God, look what I found! And in the end, that might be somewhat another Brazilian saying for you guys: trimming the pig.
A lot of cries for very few actual hair.

So you create all that commotion, all that need and so that comes escalating from CEOs, whatsoever, security teams for something that in the end might be some moderate impact or sometimes even something that does not affect some customer systems. So it’s a lot of brouhaha, I would say. However, on the other hand, there are some security events that are definitely something that you should pay close attention to.

So for example, we had the Heartbleed and then there was Shellshock and ghosts. I’ve been over the course of the years, a number of GLIBC vulnerabilities that can elevate you to root, even to the extent that it was even used as a tool to get a root on the system that someone forgot the password. Yes, that happened once, to a customer that shall be renamed unnamed.

And then finally, I think the mother of all incidents that I worked with, it would be the XZ security incident that happened a couple of months ago. More often than not this is something that just created distress with the security people with the good people managing the data center without something that’s really putting the customer at risk. However, on the other hand sometimes, some less often there, will be definitely something that’s really of concern and because the customer should pay close attention for that.

CRob (04:52)
So what do you think the motivation is that last year there were like 25,000 vulnerabilities? What’s your perception of why some of these get a celebrity treatment and others don’t that may be more severe?

Rodrigo Freire (05:08)
I have read somewhere on the internet, over the internet, something more like in the lines that over promoting something for personal gain. That resonated very well with me. On the community industry, there’s a lot of effort that’s put for you to render your portfolio, your reputation across the industry. And so, someone shows on the resume, hey, I was a guy who found the Heartbleed or the Ghost vulnerability.

A lot of people are going to recognize you, oh my God, you found that vulnerability, So yeah, it might be something like that. Sometimes it might not be that intent, but in the end, Chris, I really don’t think that’s not something that’s changed the tide on the security landscape for a good impact, I would say.

CRob (06:00)
Yeah, I would agree. Thinking about you managing some of these high-profile incidents, for our audience, maybe you could shed some light on what goes on behind the scenes when a security researcher comes to an open source project or a vendor like Red Hat. How do you get all the stakeholders together? How do you run these types of things? How do you keep the team focused?

Rodrigo Freire (06:22)
Internally at Red Hat we have some internal prioritization of the CV based on the scale. We use a four point scale. We are not attached to the CVSS score or the ranking. We focus on the product rank for the security issue. Say for example, I use HTTP server, for example, Apache HTTP my system. Alright, so there’s a vulnerability affecting CVSS score in 10, a perfect 10 on CVSS for that.

However, this functionality it’s not exposed on my system or is not use it is not enabled is not supported. Why would I score that as a 10 since it’s not a valid usage on my product? So yes, I would just lump something as not a factor or even a factor, but the impact is low. Putting the customers at a heightened risk, we take that, so this is a Red Hat score as a product. I strongly believe that the the way we rank these vulnerabilities on our product is how the customers should actually be paying attention instead of taking the worst -case scenario in whatever possible use of the component.

I’m not saying that this is not important. It is, it is key. However, we do have people, we have a human operator that’s taking into account how that vulnerability is actually exposed on the product. So I think that’s something very important for the vendors to do. So they take a general vulnerability and then you issue a score for your product. How is that actually exposed on our product? So that said, this is how we select how and went to fix something.

And then, let’s say for example, in the case of a high-profile event, oh man, there was a very ugly vulnerability that showed at the eve of 2022 to 2023. It was December the 21, something like that. It was on the 20s. So we had the company at a freeze and I was working. So the…sorry, this still has to be taken, right? And then there was a KSMDB, it was a kernel SMB server vulnerability. Actually, it was a stream of them that was disclosed by Zero Day Initiative.

That was an uphill battle because in the end it was not affecting RAN because we don’t enable KSMDB on our kernels. So it was not affecting us. However, I needed to get all the techies, all the specialists to assure and ensure because customers questions were starting to pile up. It’s not only RAN had that runs 24-7, our customers as well were surprised. So we have to provide the answers. And then finding the right resources. This is one of the key abilities for everyone managing any security program. So it’s this vast network of contacts and who to ask and who to grab by the arms. Man, I need you to right now to please assess this vulnerability.

It’s a very important asset to have that disclosing the age again that Rolodex of context and to know the ones who ask for help to get information. You don’t have to know the information, you have to know who knows.

CRob (09:55)
Right, and I think it’s really important that some people in the supply chain, like a commercial Linux vendor, are able to contextualize that. Vulnerability may be abstract or not applicable, and I love that, that a lot of folks do that within the supply chain. Thinking about a vulnerability disclosure program, what we colloquially refer to as VDP, it’s important for large projects, and it’s required for a large commercial enterprise.

Could you maybe talk to some of our listeners about what the benefits to their downstreams would be to put the pieces in place to get some type of vulnerability disclosure program together?

Rodrigo Freire (10:33)
So Red Hat has a VDP in progress, so we credit for every finder that comes to us disclosing a vulnerability, we’re going to acknowledge, we’re going to point towards the person who finds this CVE. This is an integral part of our workflow for giving credit to the finder. Of course, we ask the finder, would you like to be credited? How would you like to see that credit get credited?

And also, that’s not only for the CVEs, however, for findings on our infrastructures as well. So for example, on the customer portal or on some catalog or webpage or whatever else they find something at Red Hat, we give credit to every finder. We don’t do bug bounties. However, we have this VDP, so someone is working their way to have a portfolio as a finder, as a pen tester, as a CVE finder. That’s 100% fine. We will give credit.

And then, this is getting adjusted, we will negotiate with the finder how much of time would you want to have that under embargo? So we have all this negotiation with the finder to make something that can accommodate everyone’s need.

CRob (11:48)
So it’s some good points. Well, let’s move on to the rapid-fire part of the interview. (Sound effect: Rapid fire!) Yeah!

Rodrigo Freire (11:56)
Here we go!

CRob (11:57)
First question. Here we go! Are you ready? Spicy or mild food?

Rodrigo Freire (12:03)
Definitely spicy, man. I’ve been to India in November on the end of last year, man. It was the time of my life eating any spicy food to the point of sweating in my head, man! That was a trip!

CRob (12:20)
Nice! (Sound effect: Oh, that’s spicy!) What’s your favorite whiskey?

Rodrigo Freire (12:26)
It’s Talisker. And I tell you what, if you’re having a Talisker and then you drink Blue Label, I’m sorry, Blue Label, that’s going to fade. Blue Label is just going to fade away. Talisker for the win.

CRob (12:42)
Very nice. Next question, Vi or Emacs?

Rodrigo Freire (12:46)
Vi, come on man!

CRob (12:48)
(Laughter) Nice! Rodrigo, what’s your favorite type of hat?

Rodrigo Freire (12:55)
Type of hat? Man, I actually found that, well, my favorite one is actually a Red Hat, right? But after I got a decision to become a bald person, I actually liked being bald and I seldom use any kind of hat, right? So I’m a proud bald, I’d say. On the other hand, it would be just a baseball cap.

CRob (13:17)
OK, fair enough. And last question, tabs or spaces?

Rodrigo Freire (13:22)
Tabs! Show some finesse!

CRob (13:26)
Nice, excellent, excellent. Well, now. (Sound effect: That’s saucy!) As we wind up, do you have any advice for someone that’s looking to get into the field, whether it’s cybersecurity incident response or open source development? What advice do you have for these newcomers?

Rodrigo Freire (13:43)
First of all, play nice. Show respect and make your due diligence. I think everyone is going to embrace you wholeheartedly because no one likes vulnerability. So if you’re going to find new stuff or even help to fix this stuff, show the attitude. So be positive, make your relationship network. That’s important because without it you’re not going to succeed or you’re going to earn some bad reputation as well. Everyone’s already fighting a hard battle, so play nice.

CRob (14:15)
Nice. That’s excellent, fantastic advice. And our last question, do you have a call to action that you want to inspire our listeners to go do as soon as they listen to this?

Rodrigo Freire (14:26)
Yeah, definitely. So, take into account your environment. So, no one likes emergencies. Emergencies are expensive. No one likes emergency maintenance windows. So, get to understand your environment. So, is this CVE, is this vulnerability really affecting? So, can you be that trusted advisor on your organization so you actually can be the person who sets the expectation, the needs of the company?

There’s some pressure from these high profile events from the upper floor asking hard questions. So get to understand your real need so you can actually schedule something that will not hurt your team or your availability or even the stability of your environment. And finally, I would say ask questions. So ask your vendor or your account reps or your consultants. So yeah, if you’re in doubt, go ask your questions. And I think I am positive that they are going to ensure you that you have a secure and stable environment.

CRob (15:38)
Excellent. That’s, I think, some great advice from someone that’s been there on the front lines helping fight the good fight for downstream and representing its customers. Rodrigo, thank you for joining us today on What’s in the SOSS? Really appreciate you coming and talking to us.

Rodrigo Freire (15:53)
Thank you, Chris. And one last word I would like to stress here. So on the security discussion, there’s no Red Hat. There’s no Canonical. There’s not Oracle. No. We all collaborate very closely when it gives regard to security issues. We are in close touch to everyone. Everyone knows each other. So there’s no, Red Hat’s only playing ball alone. No such a thing. I got to tell you guys, the XZ security incident was first disclosed to Debian and then Debian got in touch with us and then we started the coordination. So, yeah.

CRob (16:32)
I love that about our community, the fact that we all come together and able to put our colored hats to the side and come together and collaborate.

Rodrigo Freire (16:37)
Exactly, mister!

CRob (16:39)
Excellent. Well, thank you, Rodrigo. Have a great day.

Rodrigo Freire (16:42)
Thanks, Chris.

Announcer (16:43)
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/getinvolved. We’ll talk to you next time on What’s in the SOSS?

In this episode, CRob talks to Stephanie Domas, CISO at Canonical, the creators of the popular operating system Ubuntu. Having started her career with over 10 years of ethical hacking, reverse engineering and advanced vulnerability analysis, Stephanie has a deep knowledge and passion for the hacker mindset.

• 01:14: Stephanie shares how she got her start in security
• 05:41 Interesting things Stephanie has discovered since becoming more directly involved with open source
• 08:20 The challenge of instilling trust into those who consume open source
• 12:42 Stephanie answers CRob’s rapid-fire questions
• 14:07 Stephanie’s advice to those getting into cybersecurity
• 15:43 Stephanie’s call to action for listeners

• Stephanie Domas on LinkedIn
• Canonical homepage
• White House’s M-22-18 memorandum
• CISA RSAA
• Secure Software Development Attestation Form
• NIST Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF) SP 800-218
• Get involved with the OpenSSF community

Stephanie Domas soundbite (00:01)
For those who aren’t in security community yet, if you have that protector personality and you like to help and you like to make sure things are great when people use them, security may be for you, right? Those tinkerers and those protectors make such phenomenal security people. If those are you, we need you in security.

CRob (00:18)
Hello everybody, I’m CRob. I do security stuff on the internet. I’m also a community leader within the OpenSSF. And we have this nice little podcast you’re listening to called What’s in the SOSS? Where I get to talk to the most amazing people that work within and around open source software. And today we have a special treat. We have Stephanie Domas. She’s the CISO of Canonical. And she’s also a former teammate of mine and a fellow Ohioan. Stephanie, welcome to the show.

Stephanie Domas (00:52)
Thank you, CRob, it’s nice to see you again and thanks for inviting me.

CRob (00:55)
You’re very welcome. It’s nice to be seen. Gotta couple questions here. We’re going to have some fun questions later on, but let’s start off. Why don’t you describe to vthe audience kind of who you are? What’s your origin story and kind of what led you to this point where you’re working with one of the major commercial open source distributions today?

Stephanie Domas (01:14)
Yeah, absolutely. So the story of Stephanie and so it all starts back in middle school. And I won’t go, I won’t make this a huge long story, but I do think it’s, it’s, I don’t know, it’s colorful background, right? So back in middle school, right? I started to get into PC gaming, like all good nerds were at that time. And I, you know, hypothetically started to get very interested in how the cracked versions of things that I was hypothetically downloading worked.

And so while I was a consumer of these things, I really wanted to understand, you know, how were people figuring out where to patch? How were people figuring out how to change these games so I had more money or I had new powers. And so this led me on this spiral of just really wanting to understand how computers worked, right? So it all started with just how, how was this even happening? And so I kept digging deeper and deeper. And before, you know, I was in university studying electrical and computer engineering, and I was focused on processors.

And so I was very interested in essentially this, the brain of the computer, right? How is it doing it? Because at the end of the day, when I started to peel back the layers of cracks and the key gens, it all came back to trying to manipulate how the computer worked. And so I found this super interesting. And so, you know, I went to college, I started to get really interested in the cyber side of things, right? So when my university didn’t have a cyber program, I was still very interested in trying to peel back that onion.

And so I started, I joined an ethical hacking team. I participated in Capture the Flags or CTS and I was very fortunate that that first role I landed outside of college was on a security research team. And so I got to spend seven years just doing really fascinating security research. And given my focus was processors, as you can guess, my focus was on x86. So I did a tremendous amount of x86 security research for a number of years. And while that was immensely fun, at a certain point, I felt like I wanted to have a bigger impact on the world. And while my research was like interesting, right? I didn’t feel like I was having that big impact. And so I kind of did two things, right? I one decided to go do a startup and not just a startup, but I wanted to do it in an industry where I felt like cybersecurity was really, really weak. Right. And so I went and did a medical device cybersecurity startup. I felt like that, that industry, because of the impact for patient harm had this really high need for security and yet not a lot of security people were focused in the area.

And so I did a startup that, to this day is still having, I think, a profound impact on that community. And then I also started teaching because I wanted to give back, have a bigger impact. And so I started to adjunct at my alma mater, which is the Ohio State University, teaching a bunch of software and security courses and assembly. And, you know, I eventually started transitioning. I also started teaching at your traditional security conferences like Black Hat and DEF CON and DerbyCon. And then given my background in processors, I obviously ended up at Intel, which is where we had the privilege of meeting.

And so I got to be there for three years as the chief security technology strategist. And that was a ton of fun, right? Given Intel’s large impact across the world’s compute, right? I got to sort of fulfill my desire of driving impact across the world’s compute. And then last September, I had the honor of joining Canonical as their first CISO. And that’s really exciting for me because as you know, we all know listening to this, right? That just open source is such this beautiful thing where we’re capturing the world’s creativity as code. And while Canonical is the maintainer of dozens of open source projects, we are obviously most commonly known for Ubuntu.

And I’m also this fundamental believer that while a lot of people think of security as sort of guarding gates or building fences, it is all of that. But I actually believe it’s so much more that that security is also about building bridges and enabling compute that couldn’t have happened otherwise without security. And so I’m still on that mission to improve the world’s compute by doing amazing things in security. And so I’m so excited to be at Canonical to be a part of bringing that sort of how can security be an enabler to the world’s compute through open source.

CRob (05:14)
Nice. Well, you said something interesting that I want to circle back to in a future episode. I want to talk about DerbyCon, which was one of my favorite conferences ever.

Stephanie Domas (05:23)
I was so sad when they closed down.

CRob (05:25)
I know! #TrevorForget! But you know it being new to open source. What’s one of the most interesting differences that you’ve encountered kind of in your journey here and as you’ve gotten to know the culture around Canonical and the broader upstream open source?

Stephanie Domas (05:41)
Yeah, so this is a super fascinating thing for me because before joining Canonical, while I had been a consumer of open source and Ubuntu had been one of my daily drivers for, I don’t know, 15 years, basically, since they started doing security research, I wasn’t actually that familiar with or hadn’t really dug into the unique nuances of how you actually drive security into open source. And so that was obviously one of the first things that needed to happen in a transition here.

And so one of the really fascinating things to me was there are so many common practices in how you drive security into software, right? Commonly captured as things like your SDLC and SDLC best practices. And a lot of that is just, I don’t know, it’s relatively mature, right? Here’s all the things you need to do. And so one of the things that was super fascinating to me and is still just like a constant source of interest for me is how you translate all of those SDLC practices into open source. There’s so many nuances associated with one, it being open source, right? The fact that there are so many contributors and community members, but also one of the things that has been really eye-opening to me in the open source space is because it’s open source, you have so much more, you have much more complex dependency systems in the software, right?

Because it’s open source and because there’s a sense of community and because everyone sort of develops a library that does something and then everyone else consumes it, right? You get much more of these really complex interdependencies and upstreams and downstreams that just simply don’t exist in proprietary software. And so when you start trying to apply your traditional SDLC practices to this, a lot of it doesn’t fit. And so it’s an interesting paradigm of there are known good things to do and they don’t quite translate into open source. Some of them do, but a lot of them don’t. And so that’s been a really interesting journey for me to try and figure out what can we take, what doesn’t fit, how could we make it fit, how can we still achieve some of the same outcomes in this open source and really immensely complex dependency trees.

CRob (07:40)
It’s a great challenge that I’m glad that we have folks such as yourself helping try to drive this. And that kind of touches onto our next question. You’ve spent time within traditional large enterprises and generally with those types of companies, you’ve got well-defined boundaries and regulations and policies and whatnot. And part of Canonical’s job is making open source consumable for those types of customers. Talk a little bit about some of the processes that might work in an enterprise that can help instill trust into folks’ open source software consumption.

Stephanie Domas (08:20)
Yeah, so this one’s super fascinating as well because there’s open source and then there’s open source that is enterprise-ready. And while sometimes that means at the high level, right, it’s things like, it’s resilient, it’s been tested, maybe it’s supported. But I would say that’s actually kind of just cracking the surface of this, right? At the end of the day, you know, Canonical sits at this sort of in-between enterprise and open source. And some of the really interesting things, especially you see in the security space, is this desire for these companies to translate what they know as secure practices into the open source space.

And so I also mentioned in the last question, right, the SDLC, right? The number of questionnaires we get from customers that say, do you have an SDLC? Does it meet all these requirements? And it’s their standard questionnaire, right? It’s all those standard best practices I just talked about. And it’s really, really hard to say yes to those and feel like you can write like a real solid checkbox in that line. And so just giving like a super nerdy example is something that’s just been on my mind recently. So I’m going to throw out some nerd numbers here. So the OMB memorandum, M-22-18, right? I see you shaking your head and I know people can’t see this.

CRob (09:33)
Oh, I’m familiar with it.

Stephanie Domas (09:35)
The thing is just, this is, this is a real big thing right now and it is requiring software manufacturers to fill out a repository for software attestation art, sorry a secure software development attestation form to then file in the repository for software access stations and artifacts. This form is derived from the NIST SSDF, which is the NIST secure software development framework, SP 218. I’m throwing so many numbers at us right now, but the whole point is, right, this is an example of sort of what I talked about in the last question where enterprises have these known ways of doing things and then this SSDF is a common accepted way of doing secure development lifecycle, but a lot of it, well, not all of it translates cleanly to open source.

And so now you have these memorandums coming out asking software developers to fill out this form. And some of the questions in there, I would say at least half of the questions inside of it are around the development machines, right? Was the development done on a machine that is isolated? Was the development done on a machine that follows security best practices? Well, how on earth am I supposed to answer that question for open source? Do I answer with the mindset of just Canonical developers, in which case I can give a straight answer? Do I answer with the community members? And the form that they’ve developed has no area for you to explain nuance. You’re either in alignment with the form or you answer no and they consider you sort of out of alignment and you are considered to need to put together a plan for how you get in alignment.

And so things like this are really interesting in sitting in that intersection between enterprises and open source because a lot of these sort of regulations and efforts of what these enterprises are looking for, right? The checkboxes they need to get in order to be able to them satisfy their customers don’t translate. And so we sit at that intersection of trying to, you know, one, make it your traditional enterprise ready with resilience and testing and code coverage and all of those great things.

But also the really interesting part of the really complex part that I think a lot of the community members maybe don’t appreciate how chaotic it is, is how you translate all of these regulations and these internal NIST frameworks that all the customers want checkboxes for into how you meet those in an open source space in a way that you can say with confidence, right, we want to have confidence when we say, yes, we meet this is really, really difficult to do. And yeah, so that memorandum is on my mind a lot right now because we’re attempting to go through that process right now. And again, it’s like, how do I answer this question when I don’t control community members’ laptops, right?

CRob (12:11)
Yeah, it’s a lot of really interesting challenges. I could spend hours talking about SDLC too. I’m really excited again that we have folks that are bringing, kind of live in both worlds. You’re bridging the gap between enterprise and community and trying to help make a successful translation. I really appreciate that. And I also appreciate we’re at the time of the show where we’re going to do the rapid fire round!

Stephanie Domas (12:35)
Woo!

CRob (12:36)
All right, I got a series of fun questions and let’s see how you do. There are no wrong answers. First question, spicy or mild food?

Stephanie Domas (12:46)
My gosh, so mild. I am absolutely a wimp with spices.

CRob (12:49)
(Laughs) Alright, fair enough. Next question. What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?

Stephanie Domas (12:55)
Vanilla.

CRob (12:56)
Vanilla? Alright. French vanilla? Vanilla bean?

Stephanie Domas (13:00)
(Laughs) I am not fancy enough for that one. My palate is not refined enough to know the difference.

CRob (13:06)
(Laugs) Very nice. All right. Vi or Emacs?

Stephanie Domas (13:12)
Vi, definitely.

CRob (13:14)
Yes, hooray! There are no wrong answers except if you pick Emacs.

Stephanie Domas (13:18)
Yes, my Vimrc file is complicated and every time I move computers and I haven’t moved it, it’s very painful. So it’s got a lot of customization, I won’t lie.

CRob (13:31)
Excellent. And last question from rapid-fire: tabs or spaces?

Stephanie Domas (13:36)
My gosh, I’m gonna get some enemies here. I’m a tabs person.

CRob (13:39)
Yeah? very nice. Again, there are no wrong answers. Everyone has their own way of working. That’s great. Thank you for sharing our little fun segment. And as we wind down, what advice do you have? You mentioned that you’ve been a teacher and you’ve given a lot of your time to try to help bring up the next generation of folks. Well, what advice do you have for people that are getting into either open source development or cybersecurity?

Stephanie Domas (14:07)
Yeah, I guess so. I’ll focus on the cybersecurity one and I’m going to get a bit of like social emotional on us here instead of technical. But my advice, my high level advice is just assume the best in your community team members until you are given a reason to otherwise. I see so many times some new vulnerability comes out or some new incident or a breach happens and I see people in the community kind of they jump to assuming negligence or assuming that people are dumb and you see statements like how could they not have done X, like that’s so obvious and it makes me really sad because I feel like most people in the community actually are really trying to do the right thing.

They are on limited resources. They have to make tough decisions and sometimes literally things just fall through the cracks and so I see people get burnout because, not because they’re not trying to do the right things because they’re trying to do the right thing, and people don’t aren’t appreciating that they’re trying to do the right thing right so we’re going to. It’s going to be a high-level one of be good to your fellow security members. And if you’re in a position to offer help to them, somebody who happens to be in the spotlight, is firefighting, is involved somehow in a breach or an incident. Instead of sitting there and trying to judge them offer to help them, even if it’s just to offer a shoulder for them to have somebody to not yell at them for a moment, send them a digital coffee, something. So assume the best in your security team members until they give you a reason to not.

CRob (15:31)
I love it. More empathy for everybody, I think, will make the world a much happier place. And finally, do you have a call to action for our listeners? Something you want to inspire them to do next?

Stephanie Domas (15:43)
Just, I know this is one, it’s also kind of cheesy. It’s just, I don’t know, just always be curious in how stuff works, right? I think there’s so many different reasons why people get into security. I got into it because I was a tinkerer and because I’m curious. If that’s your passion, right, follow that. I would also say the other really big one I see is people who have this protector personality. So if you feel like, for those who aren’t in the security community yet, right, if you ever, if you feel that protector personality and you like to help and you like to make sure things are great when people use them, right? Like security may be for you, right? Those tinkers and those protectors make such phenomenal security people. If those are you, right? We need you in security.

CRob (16:24)
That’s awesome. Such wise words. Thank you, Stephanie. I really appreciate your time. O-H…

Stephanie Domas (16:30)
I-O!

CRob (16:31)
Yes!

Announcer (16:32)
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/getinvolved. We’ll talk to you next time on What’s in the SOSS?

In this episode, CRob discusses the finer points of developer relations (DevRel) with Katherine Druckman, Open Source Evangelist at Intel and co-chair of the OpenSSF Marketing Advisory Council and DevRel Community. Katherine enjoys sharing her passion for a variety of open source topics and is a long-time open source advocate, developer and podcaster. She’s currently the host of Open at Intel and co-host of the FLOSS Weekly and Reality 2.0 podcasts. She spent over a decade at Linux Journal. A passionate Drupalist since she first downloaded a tarball in 2005, she has also been a Drupal contributor and engineer.

Additionally, Katherine will be a featured speaker at SOSS Fusion/24 in Atlanta on Oct. 22-23. SOSS Fusion/24 is a collaborative and forward-thinking initiative dedicated to securing open source software. This event will bring together a diverse community of professionals from the public sector, software developers, security engineers to cybersecurity experts, CISOs, CIOs, Founders and tech pioneers.

Katherine will be an active participant at SOSS Fusion/24 and will share her insight at the following presentations:

• Roundtable: Building Developer Confidence in Software Security with the DevRel Community, with Lori Lorusso, Percona; Tabatha DiDomenico, G-Research. Oct 22, 11:30 a.m.
• Keynote: Fireside Chat with Window Snyder, Founder & CEO, Thistle Technologies, Oct. 23, 9:30 a.m.
• Keynote: Back to Security Basics: Evaluating, Consuming, and Contributing Open Source Software, Oct. 23, 9:55 a.m.

Check out the full schedule for SOSS Fusion/24.

• 01:42 Katherine shares her non-traditional journey into open source
• 03:30 DevRel’s definition varies, depending on the organization
• 06:11 Tips for making connections with developers
• 08:23 How DevRel professionals can help integrate security practices and tooling into everyday maintainer activities
• 09:38 Katherine answers CRob’s rapid-fire questions
• 11:05 Katherine’s belief that all knowledge can be relevant — even if it’s outside of your field
• 12:23 Developers and security folks should be working together

• Katherine Druckman on LinkedIn
• OpenSSF DevRel Community
• Open at Intel podcast
• SOSS Fusion/24
• Get involved with the OpenSSF community

Announcer (00:01)
Today’s guest on What’s in the SOOS? is Katherine Druckman, Open Source Evangelist at Intel. Katherine will be a featured speaker at SOSS Fusion/24 in Atlanta, October 22nd and 23rd. SOSS Fusion is a collaborative and forward-thinking initiative dedicated to securing open source software. The event will bring together a diverse community of professionals from the public sector, software developers, security engineers to cybersecurity experts, CISOs, CIOs, founders and tech pioneers. To learn more, to register and to see the full schedule visit openssf.org.

Katherin Druckman soundbite (00:36)
We solve technical problems with technical solutions, but there are also so many human problems with so many human solutions. And I think step one to effective engagement with open source maintainers is taking notes, find out what they really, really need and then try to connect the dots.

CRob (00:54)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to What’s in the SOSS? I’m CRob. I do security stuff on the internet and I do a lot of work with the Open Source Security Foundation. I work on the Technical Advisory Committee, the governing board and a bunch of the technical groups. And one of the great things I get to do is co-host What’s in the SOSS? — our podcast about learning more about interesting topics and people within the open source ecosystem. And today we have a real treat. We have my friend from work, real work, not fun upstream work Katherine Druckman from Intel. How are you doing today, Katherine?

Katherine Druckman (01:29)
I am doing well, thank you. I appreciate you having me. This is gonna be fun.

CRob (01:34)
It’s gonna be great. So for our listeners who may not get the opportunity to work with you all the time, could you maybe give us your open source origin story?

Katherine Druckman (01:42)
Oh yeah, sure. Wow, that’s a long time ago. (Laughter) Yeah, so this is funny. I like to talk about that I have a non-traditional background. Actually, I went to my, I have an art degree and then my graduate studies were in decorative arts history. It makes total sense why I would end up here, right? So at some point in there, I was doing some — let’s call them art things and art and antiques and decorative things — and I decided I needed a website for these things.

And I had a lot of nerd friends who were very involved in some tech startup at the time. And this was in, gosh, I don’t know, around 2002 to 2004 maybe. And I was always kind of a nerd, to be honest. Like I had dabbled in a little Linux before that. So I asked one of my nerd friends and I said, hey I heard there’s such a thing as an open source content management system. What’s that and can you recommend one? (Laughter) And he said, oh, here’s a few. I tried a few. I settled on Drupal to build a website. And then I started building other websites and then I started learning more and more. And anyway, long story short, I ended up at Linux Journal because I learned the Drupal. So that’s the short-ish version of my origin story. And then I had a lot of adventures along the way and somehow all of them led me here.

CRob (03:03)
I’m going to have to do a session sometime because there are a lot of us that come from non-traditional backgrounds that work and live in here in high tech. So that’s interesting to hear. So let’s talk about kind of what you do with the Open Source Security Foundation. And this is really introduced me to a very interesting concept. So for our audience, could you maybe explain what DevRel is and why it’s important?

Katherine Druckman (03:30)
Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I co-chair the Marketing Advisory Council, is I believe what we’re calling it today. Apologies if I got that wrong. And as part of that, we created an initiative and created a DevRel community to do developer relations on behalf of the OpenSSF. And what that means, developer relations type work has a lot of names, right? Some people call it developer advocacy, evangelism and it really kind of depends on the organization where you’re doing it.

For the OpenSSF specifically, really we’re there to raise awareness where hopefully the mission is to connect developers and users and consumers of open source software and then in particular maintainers of open source software to all of the wonderful tools that brilliant people like you and all of our buddies are working on at the OpenSSF. So I got involved because, frankly, I was really into the mission of the OpenSSF even before I was at Intel.

When I heard about the formation of the OpenSSF, I was kind of following it because one of the things I do in my small amounts of free time is I occasionally co-host, and at the time I was co-hosting Floss Weekly, another podcast. And when we’re looking for news stories in the open source space, I came up with, oh look at this! There’s this new foundation. They’re doing work. It was always a source of insecurity slash curiosity for me. I never felt, when I was a software engineer, like I was fully prepared from a security perspective. So it was something that I pursued. So that’s where I jumped in.

But going back to the original question, which is, what is DevRel? The funny thing is if you asked 20 different DevRel-type people, they would probably all give you a slightly different answer. Because at the end of the day, you really kind of need to connect the goals with the specific organization with the work that you do. Because it can vary. Generally speaking, it’s whatever serves the needs of your organization. And it can be education. It can be being a catalyst between end users and a product. You might work with product teams, but you might be more educational and community focused like I am. The meaning varies depending on the organization. Yeah, and it’s just, it’s not an obvious answer, I don’t think.

CRob (05:49)
That makes sense. As you know, it’s very hard to quantify what the open source is. There’s so many different permutations, so I get that. Thinking about the role of DevRel and maybe in particular with the OpenSSF, from your perspective, what have you seen that works with trying to help get engaged with maintainers and then keeping them engaged?

Katherine Druckman (06:11)
I guess I’ve seen a lot (Laughter). So back to the thing about, you know, it varies, right? I think ultimately, developer advocates and developer relations people are there to identify with and advocate for the needs of developers, because we are them. Most people that are in the DevRel space were developers, were software engineers. And we’re kind of, we’re drawing on that on our personal experiences. And I think what works, if you want to engage, especially with open source maintainers, developers and maintainers just want to get things done. We’re ultimately, we’re makers, right? We’re makers and we’re creators. And I think we all crave resources to help with that.

Sometimes it’s education, sometimes it’s tools. Sometimes it’s just, being heard, I think. So something that’s resonated for me: I’ve started having some conversations recently about maintainer burnout that have gone unexpectedly well. And I did this, I think, for a lot of reasons, right? I like to talk to smart people about anything and everything. So any excuse to talk to a lot of really interesting open source maintainers, I’m all over. But this was a topic, I think, on my mind and on the minds of a lot of people on my team.

So I started talking to more and more people. And I think these conversations have resonated even more than I expected. And I, my suspicion is just because people feel heard and understood and listened to. And it’s, so, you know, I think if, if you want to engage with software maintainers, step one is listening to them. You know, forming those human connections, you know, I think, you know, we get bogged down in the world of software and it’s a very, we, we solve technical problems with technical solutions, but there are also so many human problems with very human solutions. And I think step one to effective engagement with open source maintainers is listening. Listening, taking notes, find out what they really, really need, and then try to connect the dots.

CRob (08:12)
Well, I’m going to put my listening ears on right now. From your perspective, how do you think DevRel can help get security practices and tooling better integrated into maintainer daily workflows?

Katherine Druckman (08:23)
Yeah, that’s such a good question and a complicated one to answer, but I’m going to give it a shot. I think it goes back to listening, right? I keep saying that, but I think with things like connecting tooling, it’s figuring out all the spots along the development lifecycle where maintainers and developers are stuck, right? Where in the process are things most difficult and where do they need the tools to unblock them along the process? I think so that’s part of it. Connecting people to the things that really, really help.

Tools that smooth processes and resources really of any kind, frankly that let them kind of unplug and sleep well at night, you know (Laughter). I also feel like I would caution people to not try and focus too much on ticking boxes that don’t necessarily help the developers and maintainers. I think when you’re on one side or other of a conversation, sometimes if you’re, let’s say, a tool creator, you kind of get in the mindset of ticking the boxes that you think that people need to solve. But it’s really important to make sure that you’re pursuing the right things that really do have a direct impact on just making developers and maintainers’ lives easier.

CRob (09:38)
Let’s move on to our rapid-fire section of the interview. (Sound effect “Rapid fire!”). I’ve got a couple questions for you. Are you ready?

Katherine Druckman (09:46)
Oh, I, sure.

CRob (09:48)
Do you like spicy or mild food?

Katherine Druckman (09:51)
Oh, I like spicy, but my stomach prefers mild.

CRob (09:54)
(Laughter) Fair. What’s your favorite cocktail?

Katherine Druckman (0958)
Oh, gosh, lately a Paloma.

CRob (10:01)
Vi or Emacs?

Katherine Druckman (10:02)
Vi.

CRob (10:04)
Oh, thank you. Yay. There are no wrong answers, but Vi is always right. Being that you’re a fellow podcaster, what’s your favorite type of microphone?

Katherine Druckman (10:14)
Ahhh, ohhh. That’s a…I like Shure. I have a couple really good Shure mics.

CRob (10:19)
I love it too. So last question, rapid-fire, tabs or spaces?

Katherine Druckman (10:24)
Oh, God. Spaces. But I’m probably gonna get…

CRob (10:28)
(Laughter) This is very controversial.

Katherine Druckman (10:29)
I know. I’m probably gonna get yelled at for that, but I know I’m supposed to…I feel like I’m supposed to say tabs, but if I’m being honest, I’m probably gonna say spaces.

CRob (10:39)
That’s fair. Again there are no wrong answers. It all goes up to personal style and especially working with developers. No two developers do their work the exact same way.

Katherine Druckman (10:48)
Fair.

CRob (10:49)
Thank you for those amazing insights. So as we wind down here and close out, what advice do you have for somebody that’s interested in starting a career, whether it’s as an open source developer or getting into like cybersecurity or anything? What advice do you have to the new next generation?

Katherine Druckman (11:05)
Sure, yeah. Well, as I mentioned when we first started, I have a very non-traditional path, right? And I would say don’t be afraid of that. Learn all the things because you would be surprised at what sort of obscure piece of knowledge you might dig up from all of your experiences that might help you. Something from another field. I really like kind of interdisciplinary thinking. The example I use a lot, probably too much, is ergonomics and design, German kitchens of the 1930s. Yeah, it’s a whole thing. That’s what happens when you go to grad school for design history. But it’s a thing.

And every now and then, I think back to it. And I think about just the effectiveness and the simplicity and the amount of attention to detail that people put into the evolution of the modern kitchen. And it comes out in unexpected ways. And that’s, you know, it’s kind of a random and possibly silly example, we are a whole people and we draw from our, from all of our experiences. So I would just recommend learn all the things. Nothing is, nothing is not relevant.

CRob (12:11)
Awesome advice and I really like the idea of kind of connecting your background to your passions. As our final question, what call to action do you have for our listeners? Is there anything you want to inspire them to go do?

Katherine Druckman (12:23)
Yeah, come join our OpenSSF DevRel community. That’s the biggest one. Yeah, we have office hours, we have meetings, this is open to anyone. We would love to see more developers and maintainers help get this thing off the ground. Have a really effective meeting of the security folks and the developers because I feel like sometimes we’re seen as almost like opposite sides, which doesn’t make sense to me because to me, I don’t think of it that way. I never have.

I’ve always been a developer who wanted to do the right thing from a security perspective. So I feel like we should all just be like me. (Laughter) But seriously, come to our meetings, come join us. You might have some fun. We’re solving important problems. And yeah, I look forward to seeing everyone. The other last piece of advice I would have is I just got a refrigerator that has a freezer that makes craft ice and it makes these balls, because we’re talking about cocktails, it makes spherical ice. So yeah, that’s my other piece of advice. Get your hands on one of those because it’s really cool. The cocktail question reminded me and I feel like I needed to mention that.

CRob (13:29)
(Sound effect: “That’s saucy!”) That’s awesome. Thank you so much, Katherine. I really appreciate our conversation and everything you do to help get developers engaged and help get them empowered to continue the amazing work they do. So thanks for joining us on What’s in the SOSS? And we look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you.

Announcer (13:48)
Thank you for listening to this episode of What’s In the SOSS? an OpenSSF Podcast. As a reminder, Katherine Druckman will be a featured speaker at SOSS Fusion/24 in Atlanta, October 22nd and 23rd. To learn more, to register and to see the full schedule, visit open ssf dot org. And to subscribe to our series of conversations on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocketcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll talk to you next time on What’s in the SOSS?