Podcast

May 20

What’s in the SOSS? Podcast #31 – S2E08 Cybersecurity Framework Launch

By OpenSSF Podcast

Summary

In this episode of What’s in the SOSS, host CRob interviews Clyde Seepersad from the LF Education Department. They discuss Clyde’s journey into open source, the role of LF Education in supporting the community, and the importance of cybersecurity education. They also delve into the development of the Cybersecurity Skills Framework, emphasizing the need for continuous learning and community engagement in the tech industry.

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on Overcast Listen on Pocket Casts

Conversation Highlights

00:00 Introduction to Open Source and LF Education
02:59 Clyde’s Journey into Open Source
05:54 The Role of LF Education in Open Source
09:00 Cybersecurity and the Global IT Cyber Skills Framework
11:59 Framework Development and Industry Collaboration
15:13 Continuous Learning and Community Engagement

Episode Links

Transcript

Intro Music (00:00)

Clyde Seepersad (00:02)
Five years ago, eight years ago it was “What are these container things and how are they going to make a difference?” Fifteen years ago it was “What is this hypervisor and how’s it going to make a difference?” We’re having a moment now where there’s this combination of security’s super important in every single aspect.

CRob (00:20)
Welcome back to What’s in the Sauce, the OpenSSF’s podcast where we talk to interesting people that are involved in open source development and standards and supporting our amazing communities. And this is the season two we’re quite excited to have graduated on to the next level. I’m CRob, I’m one of your hosts here at the OpenSSF.

I’ve had the pleasure to be involved with this community for just under five years and I get this amazing chance to interview some amazing, interesting luminaries. And today we have a real treat. We have Clyde from the LF Education Department and they specialize in helping people understand.

open source tools and methodologies and techniques. So, Clyde, can you give us maybe a few minutes of your open source origin story and kind of explain a little bit about what LF Education does?

Clyde Seepersad (01:19)
Thanks, CRob. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to have education be talked of as a luminary because often when we do materials, people start looking very intently at their toes and hoping that somebody else will do it. Always happy to get a platform to encourage more folks to come on in. The water is fine. I am sort of a latecomer to open source. I’ve been involved for the past 10 years or so and was off on the dark side doing my thing.

And one day a headhunter called up and said, we have this interesting opportunity. We think you’d be good for it. And at the time I was in Austin, Texas. And I thought, well, know, Austin is not that big a town. It was great to meet extra people. We’ve scheduled a 20 minute coffee and no harm, foul. And it took two and a half hours to wrap up the conversation because we just kept going and I kept thinking, I had no idea that dot, dot, dot.

And so I left that meeting, went home, told my wife that the coffee I had told her about ended up being a two and a half hour conversation and I was going to leave my job and go do this non-profit thing that she had never heard about and that I had only barely heard about several hours earlier. And it just…

CRob (02:35)
must have been some great coffee.

Clyde Seepersad (02:37)
It was good coffee. I think it got cold several times. So the refresh cycle on the coffee was good, which, you know, is important. And, It’s just been such a phenomenal ride, right? Obviously, we’re recording this, whatever, 10 days after the deep seek drop, and cool things just keep happening in collaboratively developed spaces, which is, maybe not ever was thus, but certainly ever will be thus. I think that is the new way that stuff gets done. And of course, one of our big priorities along with everybody else on planet Earth in the last few years has been the security space and trying to think about what more could and should we all be doing.

CRob (03:18)
Mm hm. So a lot of people might not be aware that the Linux Foundation has a whole group dedicated towards training and education. So maybe could you talk a little bit about your group and kind of the things that you all do for the community and our members?

Clyde Seepersad (03:33)
Technical folks like to work on technical problems, right? They like to spin up new projects. They like to work on road maps and get from beta versions to release candidates to GA to one to two to X. Some of them like to go to meetups and connect with other folks. Not terribly many like to step back and think about how will I onboard the next person who isn’t currently super excited about this. And I think that’s where this team shows up as we say, as we show up and we say, listen, we can help you with the instructional design. We can help you with the development of quizzes, with the multimedia, with the video, with the, you know, the multilingual stuff, with the production value, with the sort of mapping out of the process, with the handling of the tools that author the content.

If we, if you can work with us, because the one thing we’re not as experts in, fill in the blank, right? There’s a thousand projects at the LF. A lot of what seems scary in terms of putting education together and not just putting it together, but importantly, getting it into the hands of the right people quickly is what we can do. And so that’s what I like to brag on this team is we’re doing a lot of things that aren’t central to any one open source project or initiative, but we’re bringing a set of skills and capabilities that you typically don’t find in kind of the core maintainer community, but they’re very complimentary and we can say, we’ve got all the folks and the tools and the processes to do all the stuff that makes your, know, makes your hair hurt. Let’s work with you. Let’s work with you to get the story out. And importantly, let’s get the story out not just to the people who are already excited and way down the weeds in the GitHub repo.

Let’s get the story out to the next folks out there who, if you ask the question, and I always say to the team, the most important question we can help folks answer is what is that tech and why do I care? And that is very much about, you know, what are these technologies? What did they do that were impossible yesterday, was much easier to do, was able to do in a way that is more cost effective because it’s a shared license. Because that’s where we help, but that’s where we can really help is to bring new people into these ecosystems.

CRob (05:53)
So thinking back of your journey with the LF Education crew, what are some of the timely topics? Like what are some of the most requested things or what are you all working on? What’s your priority lately?

Clyde Seepersad (06:06)
Well, you’ll be shocked to hear that AI is on the list.

CRob (06:13)
You’re right I am shocked.

Clyde Seepersad (06:14)
Pretty much the only two topics I hear currently are security and AI. Five years ago, eight years ago, it was what are these container things and how are they going to make a difference? 15 years ago,it was what is this hypervisor and how is it going to make a difference?
And then you get the most specialized conversations and things like networking. But I think it is definitely true that we’re having a moment now where there’s this combination of security is super important in every single aspect and trying to figure out what exactly the Gen.ai future is going to look like and where we never ever have a junior software developer ever again because, quote, GitHub is pretty good at first pass stuff. You know, I think there’s a series of really active conversations around trying to envision what our future is going to look like. And both those components are front and center.

CRob (07:09)
Very nice. Well, one of the things that you and I have been collaborating on most recently is the global IT cyber skills framework. Could you maybe talk a little about where this idea came from and kind of what you’re intending to do with this project?

Clyde Seepersad (07:25)
Sure, and really appreciate all the support you’ve provided on this. It really started with a very simple observation, which is, as I listen to folks talking about cybersecurity, a lot of what the pattern we kept hearing was there are specific job functions and areas of responsibility related to cybersecurity that everybody wants to be very focused on. So whether that is intrusion detection, pen testing, there’s a lot of specialized focus on cyber. And it’s a little bit like the Sherlock Holmes story where the key clue was the dog that didn’t bark. What about all the people who aren’t cyber security specialists? They’re app developers, they’re network people, they’re database admins, getting up every morning thinking about where the latest vulnerability is going to come from. But they have not been part of the conversation.

And so I think that’s really what we’re trying to do here is to say, we have to find a way to make everybody who touches these systems part of the conversation on cybersecurity and make it easy for them to figure out what their part in the broader strategy is. security is not something you can inspect in at the end, right? It has to be there from the get-go. And that has not been…a big part of the conversation, which is not surprising when the fire is hot as you put in the water on the most immediate source of the flames, but you’re not paying as much attention yet as to where the fuel load is building up. And so think that’s really what we’re trying to, hoping to catalyze is a broader conversation around just how extensive the concept of cybersecurity is when you think about all these different roles in technology. And so it’s great that we’ve started with the specific folks that are in a CISO’s office, but we have to make sure we don’t stop there.

CRob (09:32)
Yeah, I love that kind of looking at the framework, the fact that we looked at many different job types and kind of thought about it from somebody’s career at the beginning of their career, they needed to have certain experiences. And as you evolve and kind of get more, you level up, so to speak, there’s more increasingly complex tasks that you’re asked to do with. you talk a little bit about – just give us kind of a sneak peek into the framework and kind of what went into some of this thinking.

Clyde Seepersad (10:01)
Yeah, think we, there were two things we were trying to make sure that we use as our North Star. The first was it had to be easy to use. We have to make it easy for people to have this conversation. So how can we develop something that is not intimidating, easy to use, people can see their way to the end goal where they’re using it. And the second is, can we make something that is not a special snowflake, that is industry agnostic, that’s geography agnostic? Because what you, and to have those two things be true, and you know, we worked with hundreds of folks who volunteered their time and expertise on this. Where we ended up was saying, to make it easy, we have to have it be, simple for folks to figure out where different people in their organization might slot in. So how can we group like with like? And so we went through this exercise with a group of experts and then validated it through a large form field study survey in the field. And we ended up with 14 or 15 job categories or job families.

Clyde Seepersad (11:23)
That’s not to say that there aren’t people out there who straddle lines, and there will always be, but we felt pretty good about having these categories as sort of people who are grouped together. So things like network specialists, things like database administrators, things like software developers as distinct from app developers, so smartphones. And then from a career perspective, as you alluded to, CRob, there’s this concept that there are things you need to know when you’re just starting out.

And there’s more things you need to know when you start taking more individual responsibility and yet there are more things you need to know, especially as you take on managerial responsibility and start supervising the works of others. And so what we ended up with, if you envision sort of a two by two framework, a set of job families where we have examples, we can help people visualize, oh yeah, I’ve got folks in that box. And then this continuum of experience where newer folks, there’s topics and we’re very, you the topics are quite specific and so they’re somewhat opinionated, but we wanted it to not be a hand wavy feel good.

We wanted people to be able to look into that framework, see things they violently agreed with, maybe see some things they violently disagree with because maybe it’s not relevant and that’s okay, right? It’s very much meant to be a alaqaat, Kanban style. I like this, I want to use it. I don’t like that, I want to take it out. I think this is missing because I’m in industry X and I want to add it in. But I think we’re hoping that the concept of it’s a simple framework. You can print it on one page. It’s a way to start and then make it your own. Make it relevant to your department. Make it relevant to your industry. Move stuff left, move stuff right, blend stuff between buckets, but use it as a accelerant, right? Instead of staring at the blank white board. This is the collective wisdom of hundreds of folks who spent decades in this space – stand on their shoulders, right? Use it as a jumping off point.

CRob (13:20)
I loved the kind of practitioner perspective that the framework brought. Could you maybe talk about, I know we’ve had some conversations with other folks within the ecosystem. How does this work alongside or complement other similar efforts?

Clyde Seepersad (13:37)
Yeah, I think our view is that this is meant to be a entry point for people to think about cybersecurity for their broad audiences and not to replace. There are some very good, more specialized frameworks that already exist out there, right? So you have things like SOFIA, you have things like the NICE framework. And our take was we look around and we listen.

And those are not being as used, used as much and implemented as much as you might have thought. I think part of the reason is they’re so sophisticated and there’s so much detail that they’re a little maybe intimidating if you’re starting kind of at the, at the, at the starters pistol. And so we’re envisioning this really as a gateway exercise to say, here’s a way that you could start. It’s not saying that it’s fully comprehensive of everything you’d ever think of, but it’s saying these are the lowest common denominator pieces, right?

And so it’s a discrete, easy to wrap your head around, printed on a page starting point. And hopefully what we see is that once people start their journey, they gravitate towards some of these bigger frameworks that already exist according to what makes sense for their organization, for their industry, for their geography. And so we’re very much seeing this as complimentary of frameworks that are more specialized that exist, really as a way to get more folks far enough down the path that they start using those frameworks with confidence.

CRob (15:14)
I love the effort. I’m really looking forward to kind of unleashing this and sharing it with the broader ecosystem and then starting to the devils in the details. I want to start building my own little Kanban board and kind of mapping out my journey and seeing what I and others might want to start exploring education wise next.

Clyde Seepersad (15:33)
Yeah, and that’s exactly what we’re hoping to happen, right? This is going to be a publicly available royalty free resource sponsored by OpenSSF and the LF. We want everybody to use it. We want companies, we want education providers to use it. And importantly, we want this to be an ongoing effort. So, you we’ve had a ton of people volunteer their time and expertise to get to V1. We’re very much intending to have this be an ongoing effort where we’re constantly reviewing this, you know.

At least twice a year stepping back and saying, is this still right? Because the one thing that we know is true is yesterday’s threats are not tomorrow’s threats, right? So we cannot have these be static. We have to constantly be asking ourselves, is this still relevant? Is there something else that we need to add? Because that’s the only way that you can really, if we’re trying to get people to think holistically about the security implications up and down the food chain, we have to help them keep track of stuff as it evolves. And so I think one of the beauties of doing this collaboratively is we do have the ability and the intention to continue revving, right? Just like any release schedule, right? That the 2026 version is gonna go look different and the second half of 2025 version might look different.

CRob (16:50)
Excellent. Well, let’s move on to the rapid fire part of the conversation. All right. I got a couple of wacky questions. I just want your first answer right out of the gate. What’s your favorite open source mascot?

Clyde Seepersad (17:06)
You know, it’s still Tux. It’s just, you know, I’ve got a dozen of them on my desk and it’s an oldie but a goodie.

CRob (17:19)
Excellent. Good, good, Spicier mild food.

Clyde Seepersad (17:23)
I grew up in the Caribbean, so definitely spicy.

CRob (17:30)
Ooh, that’s spicy. Excellent. What’s your favorite adult beverage?

Clyde Seepersad (17:34)
Rum and Coke.

CRob (17:35)
Classic. I love that as well. So as we wrap up here, what advice might you offer someone that’s just getting into, whether it’s open source development or cybersecurity, how can you help them start their journeys?

Clyde Seepersad (17:50)
You know, the key thing I say to folks anymore is that the world has really changed. Even when I started my career, you could pick a spot and say, I wanted to be an X. I wanted to be a database person. I wanted to be a Cisco switch person. I wanted to be an Oracle person. Because we used to have these long runways of technology staying pretty stable.

And that’s just not true anymore. I think everybody should be coming into tech and even those of us who’ve been in it should be thinking about it as an ongoing journey of lifelong learning. You’ve got to stay on your toes. The thing that made you successful three years ago probably is not going to be the thing that makes you successful this year. And so committing to this idea that it’s your responsibility to figure out the things you’re passionate about and learn them and implement them and stay on this sort of continuous journey.

That’s going to be what the foreseeable future looks like, is all of us just cross-skilling, up-skilling, feeling like we’re always slightly behind, but making that commitment to our own learning and development.

CRob (18:58)
I like to learn something new every day. And finally, what call to action do you want to give the community right now? What actions can people take to help make the world a little bit better place?

Clyde Seepersad (19:09)
Yeah, I would say for everybody who touches a tech stack, step back and start inventorying where do you think in your day-to-day job you could do one thing better that would narrow or close a security gap. We all have goals and the targets we’re trying to meet and we’re on the treadmill. Take a moment to step back.

Get off the goals treadmill. Try to find one thing, one thing that you can do better that helps narrow the surface, the attack surface, and find a way to make that happen.

CRob (19:52)
Excellent. Well, thank you. Sage advice learned over your journey. Thank you, Clyde, for coming today and sharing about the IT skills matrix and about LF education.

Clyde Seepersad (20:03)
Thanks so much for having me, CRob

CRob (20: 05)
Cheers

Outro Music (20:05)
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.

May 13

Love0

What’s in the SOSS? Podcast #30 – S2E07 Scaling Security: Inside the GitHub Securing Open Source Software Fund

By OpenSSF Podcast

Summary

In this episode of What’s in the SOSS?, CRob sits down with Kevin Crosby and Xavier René-Corail from GitHub to unpack the GitHub Secure Open Source (SOS) Fund – an innovative program that combines funding, education, and community to strengthen open source security. Learn how this unique initiative connects maintainers with training, resources, and a $10K stipend to scale security best practices. The trio also shares the origins of the fund, surprising takeaways from the first cohort, and what’s next for this rapidly growing initiative.

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on Overcast Listen on Pocket Casts

Conversation Highlights

00:00 – Introduction
00:58 – Meet the Guests
02:26 – Open Source Origin Stories
06:10 – The Spark Behind the SOS Fund
10:19 – What Participating in the Fund Looks Like
12:39 – Inside the Curriculum
14:50 – Unique Program Design & Outcomes
16:23 – Key Learnings from the First Cohort
19:09 – Feedback & Areas to Improve
21:50 – What’s Next for the Fund
23:00 – Rapid Fire Round
24:23 – Call to Action

Episode Links

Transcript

Intro Music (00:00)

Kevin Crosby (00:04)
I think that that was one of the most impressive things is just seeing these maintainers emerge out of a program and say, wow, you know, we live security now, you know, I think that that was pretty cool.

CRob (00:18)
Welcome to what’s in the sauce. The open SSF’s podcast where I talk to maintainers and developers, security researchers and experts all around the open source security ecosystem. It is my pleasure to be your host. My name is CRob. I’m the security architect for the open source security foundation and one of our co-hosts for this amazing little endeavor. And today I think we have a real treat. We have some people that have been deeply involved in upstream open source security for a very long time. And they have a pretty innovative idea that they’re going to be talking about this program we’re collaborating on together. So please let me welcome my friends, Kevin and Xavier from GitHub.

Kevin (01:04)
Thanks for having us today. It’s exciting to join the podcast and get to share this journey. And also very thankful for the partnership that you’ve brought through this program as well. Just quick background, Kevin here from GitHub. I lead our open source funding programs, specifically focused on things around GitHub sponsors that enable developers to get paid for their open source work. Think of things like hobbyists that are working on open source part-time to even full-time careers, or even folks that are starting to build companies around open source. And then programs beyond that through the secure open source fund as well as get up fund with with Microsoft’s venture fund as well

CRob (01:44)
and Xavier. Want to introduce yourself?

Xavier René-Corail (01:45)
Hey, Crob. Yes, I’m Xavier René-Corail from GitHub. I’m a Senior Director of Security Research and I lead the GitHub Security Lab. Our mission is to help secure open source. I’ve got a team of hackers who are doing security research. Another team who is in charge of creating the GitHub advisory database and managing our CNA. And, well, also, I’ve been with you, Crob, one of the…kind of initial members of the open source security foundation. We work together in the best practices working group and we are continuing to work together on securing open source.

CRob (02:26)
Yeah, I know Xavier, he and I used to be one of like 15 people that attended all the OG meetings five years ago when we got started off. I’m very glad to continue our partnership with this new evolution of kind of GitHub’s engagement with helping improve open source security.

Xavier René-Corail (02:34)
Haha right.

Xavier René-Corail (02:41)
Yes.

CRob (02:44)
So before we jump into the the SOS program, let’s talk a little bit and explore your open source origin stories. How did you get into open source and you cannot know why what drives you to keep participating here?

Kevin (02:57)
Xavier, you want to go first?

Xavier René-Corail (02:59)
Yeah, I can. So my first step in open source, let me check. So first of all, I started programming in the 80s. I think I started with Tron and I think, yes, my two first games were a snake and a pong. But then, after, you know, during high school, teenage years, I forgot a bit about that then got back to…to coding during college. And then after that, started my career as a developer. And then very quickly, I came into being in charge of development practices. And as part of that, I created the open source policy for the company I was in. And this is how I discovered open source by…um empowering the developers of my company to take advantage of open source and also of course to give back to open source and to contribute to open source. So this is how I came to work in open source.

CRob (04:11)
Awesome. What about you, Kevin?

Kevin (04:13)
Mine’s kind of an interesting story. So I’m non-technical background. Originally, I was in economics, almost did a PhD and freaked out right at the housing bust and decided to go into corporate finance. So a little bit different of an experience. But during that journey, I started working with some early stage startups and venture firms and they were building open source tools coming out of university labs and innovation. And so I got the first flavor through that and really understanding how do you leverage this technology to build innovative products, sometimes even companies around it. And then fast forward a couple of years when I was at Amazon, my next touch point was we were building products that leverage things like OpenFire and Hazelcast to build messaging applications.

One of the coolest things was because we were building with it, I wanted to make sure our engineering team was able to contribute back to that open source project. And so we were actually shipping alongside the community and making sure that they were getting some of the innovations, which was super, super cool to see. And then fast forwarding a little bit further is kind of staying within tech and venture. I was in the Alexa fund. We got to work with early stage startups investing in early stage open source AI companies got to evaluate and meet folks like Hugging Face, for example, and just kind of understanding where this ecosystem was going. And all that kind of brought this view of when I came to GitHub of how do you bolt on funding for open source, make it sustainable, drive innovation, and also create new pathways of funding for these maintainers through their journey. And so that’s what I came here to do. And it’s been super exciting over the past almost two years to think about how we can build new funding models for open source maintainers and projects. So excited for this new addition to that as well being kind of a next iteration of all of the career touch points I’ve had with open source.

CRob (06:10)
Totally didn’t arrange it, but that is an amazing transition. So let’s talk about GitHub Securing Open Source Software Fund. You know, why have you all decided to kind of organize and run this program?

Kevin (06:25)
Yeah, maybe kicking it off with an interesting insight that we had from the GitHub accelerator last year. One of the key modules that I was thinking about, and this was a brainstorm with Xavier, was do we actually know how much security education and training do people have for these emerging, fast growing projects? And even some of the ones that are becoming vital to the ecosystem.

And so I just literally threw it out to Xavier as an experiment. Like, can we try to run this content and engagement with these projects and see what the results would be? And so we did it. And maybe Xavier, if you want to talk about that initial experience, it’d be great to just kind of get your point of view from it as well.

Xavier René-Corail (07:08)
Yeah, well, it was exactly as you said, it was an experiment at first, right? And part of the accelerator and it came a bit last minute, right? But we, but I mean, at GitHub, we are ready to pivot fast and to try to think fast. And so we did some, we did some office hours, we did some one-on-one audits of this project and we did some basic training about security posture. And yes, and the results were great. mean, the engagement of the maintainers and the result, the impact that it had on them was great. So, so Kevin came again.

Kevin (07:58)
I came asking again, like, can we make this bigger? you know, I think the learning that we had is when you connect funding with time training and expertise, you’re able to maximize the impact of the training and education. so, and it also kind of dovetailed with a lot of the needs around security within the open source supply chain. So you kind of had this serendipitous moment of

high need, both in terms of like a macro level, but also high need from a developer level to make this work. And also lining that up with the incentive structure of funding and education that make it really special for these maintainers. so that actually is what kind of seeded this idea of let’s build a programmatic open source fund targeting security that links the funding to the outcomes of security specifically. And so we tested that hypothesis.

Honestly, I’ll say it took us, I think, 30 days round trip from like the seed to actually getting the program previewed at GitHub universe, bringing folks along, getting funders to commit to the program, lining up what a scaffolding curriculum might look like. And so we had that in like 27 days to preview it at GitHub universe. And I actually think that was the first time you and I spoke about it too, because we were like, hey, what do you think?

CRob (09:26)
Great, that was exactly.

Xavier René-Corail (09:27)
Yeah. I mean, it was great because so my team, the security lab, you know, we’re already doing these trainings, these free training, these additional content, this office hours. It was already part of what we do for open source. But with this program, we had the opportunity, you know, to have the, yeah, the programmatic power, know, and the marketing and the partnership and the funding, et cetera. So when Kevin came to me with that, said, yes, please, yes, let’s do that. And I must say that, yes, the turnaround was impressive. And in particular, thanks to partners like OpenSSF, who, I mean, CoreView, immediately said, yes, let’s do it. And yes, it went pretty fast indeed.

CRob (10:19)
So for our audience that may not be familiar, could you just broadly describe if a project is participating in the fund? How does that? What does that look like? What do they do?

Kevin (10:30)
Yeah, that’s a great question. Maybe I’ll tee this up really quickly by saying the overall architecture of the fund brings together funders, organizations, community partners like OpenSSF and some others that actually bring resource expertise and kind of shape the program and then GitHub as well as our maintainers. And so we kind of have this ecosystem surrounding this. And so what we’ve done as a program, as a maintainer that gets brought in,

You go through a standard application process, highlighting things around what your project is, what you do with your project, what your project does for the ecosystem, level of security awareness and education, the benefit of the funding specifically, what it can do to unlock resourcing, et cetera. And that’s kind of the process to bring them in. And once we’ve done that, we architected what I would consider a really unique structure. And I’m excited to talk about it for variety of reasons, but…

It’s effectively a three-week boot camp focused on security fundamentals, thinking about things that you need to have at day zero of building a project, all the way up to the lifespan of your project, thinking about implementing some of these techniques within the project itself, and then also some of the frontier stuff around AI. And so this three-week boot camp is around security fundamentals, best practices, but then we bolt on things like six months check-ins, 12 months check-ins.

community engagement with experts throughout the program to make sure that we actually line up all the resources that a maintainer would need, not just to learn it, but to actually embed it and embody it in their culture, make it scale out to their contributors, their communities, and even their consumers of their software. So I’m really excited about how the program’s been shaped. And a big kudos to Xavi, and I want him to talk about this in depth.

the security lab team is what bolts this together. And so I want to make sure like the impact of like how this all comes together is really focused on the security lab and the work they do. So Xavier, I would love you to kind of like jump in on the curriculum and education.

Xavier René-Corail (12:39)
Yeah, thank you, Kevin. Well, again, I mean, this is things that we were doing, but this program really brought the opportunity to amplify it. So it’s not only, it’s really together that we that we are, that we managed to put that up. So, so in terms of curriculum, yes, we, are trying during this free week bootcamp to, to, to, to have a mix of, you know, basic security posture and some advanced training on, for example, on fuzzing, on static analysis, things like that.

So you really have to mix because you have a mixed audience first. you need to, I mean, not everyone is at the same moment of their security journey, right? So you have to mix of that. We are trying to address all aspects from coding to incident response to vulnerability management.

So again, a mix of that. And of course, the important thing is that we are in continuous improvement mode. from the feedback from the first cohort, we will get to add more content. We have some people who are coming to us and proposing new content. And we’re like, yes, please come in.

So yeah, that’s in a nutshell, yes, that’s how we built this program. We are trying to get experts giving these training. So from us, but also from our partners, from the great David Wheeler, for example, from OpenSSF. So this is adding…

This is adding something to the learners, to maintainers, to have these great presenters who know what they’re talking about, giving them these presentations and answering the questions. So yes, that’s it.

Kevin (14:53)
I was gonna say, and just to double click on that a little bit, I mean, I think the uniqueness of it, to Xavier’s point, is how we framed and packaged it. So if we zoom out and say, what does a maintainer get? It’s three weeks security bootcamp with all of the education and expertise with these topics really focused on the programming. They get access to the security lab. They get access to the maintainer community.

They get access to the ecosystem partners that we’ve brought in and the funding partners as well. And then on top of that, they get embedded with like the data of like, how are we progressing in our own security journey? Like, we making progress? Are we embedding it in our community? How are we collaborating with other projects and maintainers through that as well? And so that’s kind of what the maintainers get. And the last thing that I think, you we didn’t really touch on, but the funding is really, you know, aligning the maintainers to spend the time commitment on it. So we provide a $10,000 stipend to the projects.

CRob (15:52)
Wow.

Kevin (15:52)
Most of that comes upfront, you know, the $6,000 upfront of the program to really solidify the three week boot camp. And then the others are to align onto the reporting and kind of the touch points and making sure they’re continuing on their security journey. so by aligning the funding and linking it to the outcomes that we’re trying to get with security, it becomes a really great model that is helpful for maintainers and for the projects that are being improved with security throughout the program.

CRob (16:20)
That’s awesome. So Xavier touched on it. We are just coming towards the end of the first cohort. Could maybe you share what’s been some of the most surprising things you’ve learned so far in interacting with both the funders and the maintainers and projects?

Kevin (16:41)
Maybe Xavier, do you want to go first?

Xavier René-Corail (16:44)
Well, yeah, my big surprise was the enthusiasm of everyone. I mean, I know this is something that is a passion for me, but I was, I mean, I don’t know, I wasn’t expecting that level of enthusiasm and of engagement from everyone. Really, you know, I was expecting some of the projects to be already quite advanced on the…you know, in their journey and then to be, to react a bit like, okay, there is content that is interesting for me, but some of the content is too basic. I was expecting that, right? No, everyone was really, really super engaged and super enthusiastic. So that was the big positive surprise for me. What about you, Kevin?

Kevin (17:41)
Yeah, I echo that. I kind of bucket them in three different functions. One is I think there was a very strong level of trust from the outset because they were all shared alignment on security within their project. And so I think everyone walked in and this kind of drove the enthusiasm of like, we’re all here for the same thing and having the same impact. So that was great. Two, I think the community lens was very fascinating to me just to see folks across different sizes of projects, stages of their growth or in kind of like distribution, as well as their own maturity journey within security, and like just seeing that community fuse really well together to cut across different frameworks, languages, et cetera, was really powerful. And I think the last thing that I’d say on this is the outcomes that we see is meaningful. Like not just from like, did the…things go red to green or anything like that, but really like you see them embody this change of what it means to be a steward of security with an open source. And that’s really unique. don’t think, and we kind of saw glimmers of that within the accelerator, but I didn’t think we’d, I didn’t know if we’d see it at this scope and scale. And I think that that was one of the most impressive things is just seeing these maintainers emerge out of a program and say, wow, you know, we live security now, you know, I think that that was pretty cool.

CRob (19:09)
Awesome. So on top of this, sounds like you’ve gotten a lot of great feedback. Is there anything that kind of stands out that you’ve got a maintainer or project kind of shared something really valuable to you all back from this experience?

Kevin (19:23)
I have a lot. I think one of the things that stands out in feedback is kind of going to the point of maturity curve is that it’s a very meaty subject. And so being able to scale content and education appropriately to meet maintainers where they are in their own journey is like one of the most critical things. And I think we’re we’re, you know, adjusting to that is like one one thing to think about. And then to Being able to touch upstream and downstream projects within their own Ecosystems is another area where I think that that’s a big opportunity for us to engage and kind of think about securing through the program as well. So those are just two immediate ones that I’m pretty excited about Xavi, what about you?

Xavier René-Corail (20:17)
Yeah, will double down on what you said Kevin: scaling to more projects, this will be the big challenge. And one other thing that I will add that I want to focus on also, because that was a positive feedback from participants, is adding some fun to the training. All of the training that were interactive and fun and with quizzes, et cetera. worked very well. so, yeah, you know, I used to say that boring is the arch enemy of learning. And so, yeah, I, I think that I want to add a bit more fun to the to the curriculum. So..

CRob (20:58)
I for one, totally agree with that. I think security is a lot of fun.

Xavier René-Corail (21:02)
It is.

Kevin (21:02)
The security is a lot of fun. You know, it was super interesting to see the modules I’d say that had interactive coding engagement. Like people really love just diving into it. And the other thing that was kind of unique that I don’t think it’s super surprising, but this concept of like see one, do one, teach one. Like it’s people coming through this journey and like, as you emerge, the first time you see it, like, my gosh, like this is overwhelming. The next time you do it, like I can actually do a coding exercise on this and actually implement some changes.

And then you see people a day later that are teaching like, this is how I did it, or this is how I’m thinking about it. It’s really cool to see that like, transpire throughout the program. And people loved it. Like to your point on fun, that made it fun, you know, to be able to teach people and engage is really unique.

CRob (21:50)
So let’s gaze out over the horizon, kind of what’s coming down the pipe for the GitHub Securing Open Source Software Fund. What do you have in your bag of tricks next?

Kevin (22:00)
Bag of tricks, that’s always a great question. As Xavier said, I mean, we have to scale. So we did the first session. Our objective is to do 125 projects this year. So we have multiple sessions that will be going on throughout the back half of the year. Session two will be kicking up in the next couple of months. And so we’re rapidly preparing for that. Yeah, I think that that’s where we’re looking forward to just in the back half of the year.

CRob (22:28)
Mm-hmm.

Xavier René-Corail (22:30)
Yeah. And in terms of curriculum, as I said, I’m receiving a lot of proposals to add content. going through that, going to add this content, I’m in particular interested if I have some ecosystem partners who are listening, I’m interested in language specific training for security. So if anyone has them, please reach out.

CRob (22:56)
Patches welcome, right?

Xavier René-Corail (22:58)
Yes, always.

CRob (23:00)
Nice. Well, let’s move on to the rapid fire part of our session. Are you ready for rapid, rapid, rapid fire? I have some wacky questions I’m going to ask you. Just give me the first thing that comes out of your on top of mind. First question and potentially controversial, VI or Emacs.

Xavier René-Corail (23:04)
Ha

Kevin (23:04)
Love it.

Xavier René-Corail (23:24)
Emacs.

Kevin (23:25)
I’m going to go the opposite just to say VI

CRob (23:29)
There are no wrong answers. Some are better than others, though. Also equally contentious, tabs or spaces.

Xavier René-Corail (23:30)
spaces.

Kevin (23:31)
I like tabs.

CRob (23:45)
You guys are balancing each other out very well.

Xavier René-Corail (23:45)
Right?

Kevin (23:45)
Yeah.

CRob (23:47)
Ice or neat?

Xavier René-Corail (23:50)
Neat.

Kevin (23:51)
Neat.

CRob (23:52)
excellent, excellent answer. Who’s your favorite open source mascot?

Xavier René-Corail (23:58)
Mona, of course.

Kevin (24:00)
Yeah, you can’t go wrong with Mona.

CRob (24:04)
That is perfectly fine. And finally, the most important question, mild or spicy food?

Kevin (24:12)
I’m all about spicy food.

Xavier René-Corail (24:12)
Spicy for me. Yeah, good, spicy. I’m from the Caribbean and yeah.

CRob (24:22)
Ohhhhhh….that’s spicy. Nice. Excellent. Well, thank you all for playing along. And as we wrap up, do you have any call to action or anything you want to ask our audience to potentially think about in regards to your program?

Kevin (24:33)
Certainly, I mean, right now, any maintainers that are interested in joining to up level their security, we’re welcoming applications. They’re rolling on going throughout the year. As you know, we have a robust pipeline of projects to go through in multiple sessions. So always feel free to apply. And then for funders, if they’re interested in helping secure their own dependencies, welcome those conversations. I think it allows us to unlock more opportunities and projects with with funders. They also bring unique insights and resources from their own ecosystems and Xavier said it too, and ecosystem partners that are ready for the journey to provide education, curriculum, engagement with maintainers. Some of them are even unlocking referrals for their maintainers that are coming through the program, things like that. So we would certainly welcome those opportunities throughout the year. It’s not just today, it’s not just tomorrow, but it’s an ongoing journey.

CRob (25:18)
Very nice.

CRob (25:27)
Xavi any advice for the audience to have or a call to action?

Xavier René-Corail (25:30)
No, honestly, nothing to add. I already made my cultivation. I need some language specific training for security. So if you want to help open source projects, please reach out to me.

CRob (25:48)
love it. Thank you gentlemen for helping shepherd this amazing project program together to help the ecosystem. And I really am excited to see the results as you are engaging directly with these maintainers. So thank you all for coming and I will wish everybody a happy open source and out there. Thanks all.

Xavier René-Corail (26:08)
Thank you, Crob.

Kevin (26:08)
Thanks for having us.

Outro (26:10)
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.

May 06

Love0

What’s in the SOSS? Podcast #29 – S2E06 Showing Up Fully: Meet OpenSSF’s new Community Manager, Stacey Potter

By OpenSSF Podcast

Summary

In this special episode of What’s in the SOSS?, we welcome Stacey Potter, the new Community Manager at the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). Stacey shares her winding journey from managing operations at a vitamin company to becoming a powerful advocate and connector in the open source world. We explore her community-first mindset, her work with CNCF and Platform Engineering Day, and her passion for inclusion and authenticity. Whether you’re curious about how to get started in open source or want insight into how community shapes security, this episode is for you.

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on Overcast Listen on Pocket Casts

Conversation Highlights

00:00 – Welcome + Introduction
01:34 – Stacey’s Origin Story in Open Source
03:18 – Discovering Community Management at Weaveworks
04:19 – Projects and Evolution Across CNCF and Beyond
06:13 – Co-Chairing Platform Engineering Day
10:15 – Being Openly Queer in Open Source
13:38 – What Stacey Hopes to Bring to OpenSSF
16:23 – Rapid Fire Round
17:53 – Final Thoughts

Episode Links

Transcript

Intro music (00:00)

Stacey (00:02): “It’s given me a deep understanding and appreciation for inclusiveness and being a welcoming community – I have always felt embraced here, these spaces have empowered me to show up fully as myself”

Yesenia (00:021)
Hello and welcome to What’s in the SoSS? Open SSF’s podcast where we talk to interesting people throughout the open source ecosystem, sharing their journey, experiences and wisdom. So Yessenia, I’m one of our hosts and today we have a special announcement and introduction. I am talking to OpenSSF’s Community Manager, Stacey Potter. Welcome to the open source community. Stacey, please introduce yourself to the audience.

Stacey Potter (00:48)
Hey, everyone. Thanks, Yesenia. So I’m super happy to be here. I just joined and think this is week four that we’re recording this right now. So by the time this gets posted, I might have been here for a little bit longer. But I am the new community manager here at OpenSSF. So I am here to facilitate events. I’ll be managing budgets in the background. And in general, just promoting the foundation and all of our technical initiatives. So super stoked to be here. Can’t wait to meet everybody either in person, online, in Slack, et cetera. So super happy.

Yesenia (01:25)
Super, super happy to have you and we’ll kick it off with our first question. Tell us about your journey in the open source world and just what sparked your curiosity.

Stacey Potter (01:34)
Yeah, so honestly, my path into software was more a result of circumstance than intention. I transitioned into the industry a little bit later in my career. Before that, I was working as an operations manager at a small family-run vitamin company based out of Oakland, California. And after I left that role, I applied for an office manager position at a San Francisco startup focused on what we now call Software Composition Analysis or SCA. Though I don’t even know if it was called that back then in 2009. And at the time, our tagline was something like open source software security for enterprises or something like that. I think a lot of people will know our main competitor, which was Black Duck Software. But we were just a tiny little startup having fun in San Francisco.

And that role was really like my first exposure to the world of open source, but not in a really direct way because I wasn’t working with it. And I almost felt like we were kind of pulling open source out of enterprises or making it more restrictive in certain ways. Cause it was like we were bringing to light all the open source licenses and if you should or shouldn’t use them in an enterprise, right? So it felt a little ambiguous, right?

But I spent seven years there working with the CEO and gradually kind of moved through different roles at that company. I was great about working at a startup. I was the sales operations manager. And then later I transitioned into marketing. And then that company got acquired and I stayed on for a couple more years doing marketing things. And then I transitioned out of there in 2019 and went to Weaveworks where I feel like my true journey with open source really began. I started working at Weaveworks and as a community manager at that point, transition from marketing went into community management. Thanks to general good faith in my boss at the time, which was Tama Nakahara. She’s amazing and an amazing mentor. And she was like, I have marketing, you’re fine. You’re personable. You’ll be great as a community manager and really took me under her wing and taught me everything I needed to know. And learning all about Flux and Flagger in that CNCF ecosystem and really being embraced within those communities was where I feel like it really truly began.

Yesenia (04:09)
Nice. It’s nice little journey to start and then just what brought you here now to OpenSSF? Did you come from there or have you explored other open source projects that you would like to mention?

Stacey Potter (04:19)
Yeah. So Flux and Flyer were my true introduction. Been in and around the CNCF for a while. After Weaveworks, I went to Dynatrace and worked on the Open Feature project and the Kept project, which are both CNCF projects as well. Super great communities there as well. And then after Dynatrace, I went to Stacklok, which is another startup. And they had a project called Minder, which we donated to the OpenSSF. And I had kind of heard musings of the OpenSSF when I was kind of in that CNCF ecosystem before, but didn’t really know a whole lot about it. And when I worked at StackLock, kind of became more familiar with the community. We donated that project. I went through the entire process of like what donating a project looks like within the OpenSSF ecosystem. So that was fun and interesting.

Yesenia (05:11)
Interesting.

Stacey Potter (05:18)
And yeah, that’s StackLock like switched positions. It kind of is going a different route now. And so I came to OpenSSF just almost a month ago, not quite a month ago, so three weeks ago now. And yeah, that’s how I got here.

Yesenia (05:31)
That’s amazing. Here you are. Perfect. Yeah, it sounds like a good experience exposure with community building and open source projects for CNCF and OpenSSF, which are big, big organizations when it comes to open source. So very interesting, very interesting indeed. So we’ll move on to the next question. This is during my online recon, we’ll say, consented recon. I discovered you are the co-chair of Platform Engineering Day. Can you share with the audience what this is, what the event is, and what excites you the most about working with this community?

Stacey Potter (06:13)
Yeah, absolutely. So Platform Engineering Day, mean, well, as internal developer platforms, IDPs, really help dev teams move faster by giving them tools and frameworks that they need, right? So Platform Engineering Day is all about sharing real world tips on building great internal platforms, not just the tech, but the people and the processes as well, right? So it’s a chance for platform folks from all different job titles and job roles to trade stories, lessons, and ideas on making the dev experience awesome. So what excites me about working in this community? I think there’s just so many passionate people involved in this space. I know Platform Engineering Day has become kind of this buzzy word of late, right?

Yesenia (07:11)
Marketing.

Stacey (07:13)
Exactly. But I mean, to the people who are in it, they, from my perspective, as I’ve gotten involved in it, they’re super passionate folks, right? And they really want to make this experience, you know, as good as they can. But after chatting with Paula Kennedy, who is my co chair, and Abby Bangser, whom I got to know through an old Weavework’s colleague, we felt the need for not just a bunch of tech talks on the topic. But really, we wanted to provide, as I said before, a place where platform engineers, product managers, solutions architects, and other folks could come together and share lessons learned in building and managing internal platforms, measuring platform maturity and improving these golden paths and the developer experience as a whole.

Yesenia (08:04)
Nice, do you want to do a quick plug on when the next platform engineering day is?

Stacey Potter (08:08)
Well, it’s a colo with KubeCons. So if you’re going to the next KubeCon, which I believe is North America in Atlanta, Georgia, for all those folks who are outside of the States, I’m sorry, that you may or may not be able to come here based on a number of different things. But we’re trying to do it co-located in general with KubeCons, because it kind of fits there and makes sense. And we’ve had a great response so far, right? The first one, we got more CFPs than any other co-located event had ever gotten at any KubeCon, colo event before. And I think we had hundreds and hundreds of folks in the seats listening to all these great talks. And I’ll also just highlight the platform’s working group within the CNCF too. This is a great team of people working on all things platform related. And if you’re interested in learning more about platform engineering in general, the platforms working group within the CNC app is really a great place to go.

Yesenia (09:15)
Yeah, I didn’t know that it was in KubeCon. I’m hoping to go my first year this year in Atlanta.

Stacey Potter (09:21)
Yeah. Yeah. I think Paris was our debut. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Not bad. And we just had our last one in London. Yeah.

Yesenia (09:24)
Hmm, that’s a good debut. Fashion debuted there. there you go.

Stacey Potter (9:31)
We’re so fashionable. Who knew?

Yesenia (09:36)
Talking about fashionable. During my cyber roots, I found your GitHub profile, which I loved and made me giggle and smile in several locations. But you noted you’re queer and for recording purposes, AF. I’d love to hear your perspective on how this has transformed your journey and influenced you being involved in these open source communities and anything you want to share with the audience.

Stacey Potter (10:15)
Sure. So being openly queer in tech and the open source space has been a pretty powerful part of my journey, I guess, in retrospect. It’s given me a deep understanding and appreciation for inclusiveness and being a welcoming community, regardless of what the, I guess, we’re going to call it difference is for whomever is coming into your community.

I think something I’ve been lucky to experience in the Kubernetes and cloud native and broader open source ecosystems is that welcomeness, that feeling of belonging. I’ve never felt like I didn’t belong here, right?

Yesenia (10:45)
Yeah.

Stacey Potter (10:48)
Which I think is pretty special. I mean, it’s a privileged place to be, I think in certain ways too, right? Like I am a cis white woman, right? But I present as butch and I’m you know, that’s my that’s what I call myself, right? That’s how I identify. And some people could be put off by that. But I have always felt embraced here. And, you know, like these spaces have empowered me to show up fully as myself, which has not only boosted my confidence, but also allowed me to connect with and, you know, mentor, I guess, others navigating similar paths, whether that’s being queer or being a woman or whatever.

I think visibility matters and I found that authenticity can be a bridge, right? Whether it’s in a code review, which I don’t do by the way, community calls or just, you know, contributing to projects that reflect shared values that you have, right?

Yesenia (11:48)
Yeah, it’s great because that’s the underlying foundation of open source. It’s just a community of anyone that can come in and contribute and make a project, move a project and make it successful and gave me a little bit of goosebumps there as you were speaking on that one. But because I feel the same when it comes to like the open source space is just they’re very welcoming. Every time folks are like, I’m just so scared. I’m like, trust me, don’t just go ask the questions. Like this is the place to ask the technical quote unquote “this is a dumb question…”

Stacey Potter (12:15)
Yeah, and I mean, they’re just so happy. What I have found is everyone in these communities is just so happy for people to notice them to want to get involved in the first place, right? Like they’re so stoked that you’re there. Like whatever your skill set is, they’re willing to bring you into the fold, right? They’ll make it work.

Yesenia (12:22)
Yeah.

Yesenia (12:41)
We’ll figure it out.

Stacey Potter (12:41)
You don’t need to know how to code, right? Work on docs, work on…community management, promote our events, like make us a poster or a cool logo or I mean, there’s so many different ways you can contribute if you don’t write code. I don’t write code and this is my job now. I would have never thought, right? Yeah.

Yesenia (13:00)
Yeah. Who would have thunk it? Yeah, I haven’t written code in such a long time. I write for my own like fun, so I don’t lose the skill. You know, it’s like riding a bike. I’m hoping it’s like riding a bike that you never forget, but I forgot because once again, short term memory issues.

Stacey Potter (13:12)
Yeah, right, right.

Yesenia (13:17)
Ah, this is great. Moving on to the next. You are the newest member of OpenSSF. I’m sure other folks have been hired, so I’m sorry if there’s anybody that’s newer, but as far as his recording, this is what I know. And now the Community Manager, what would you like to see in the upcoming months with the impact you plan to ripple through this ecosystem?

Stacey Potter (13:38)
Wow, that’s a big question. So as the newest member of the OpenSSF team and like you said, the community manager here, I’m really excited to help grow and connect this vibrant ecosystem. In the coming months, I think I want to focus on making it easier and more inviting for people to get involved. Whether you’re seasoned security pro or just a curious first timer, I think a lot of people don’t even know that we exist maybe – the OpenSSF. So I think just awareness in general is also something that I’d like to help promote. But know, like smoothing out the onboarding journey, launching programs like the Ambassador Initiative. I think there’s been a lot of talk internally about trying to ramp that up and get that going and supporting mentorships that help contributors thrive. I’d love to see more stories, more collaboration across projects within the OpenSSF and externally within other communities like maybe CNCF, since that’s where my prior history is, right? And more representation from folks who may not traditionally see themselves in the security space. OpenSSF already has amazing technical initiatives. My goal is to amplify the voices behind them, create inclusive pathways into our work and build bridges to other communities who share our mission. So whether it’s through meetups, events, or even just a warm welcome in Slack, I want everyone to feel like there’s a place for them here.

Yesenia (15:15)
I love it. You’re full of the goose bumps today. I love that warm welcome on Slack. You had mentioned the ambassador program. I personally haven’t heard of it. Is there any, I know you guys are just, it’s in the works. Anything you want to share about it.

Stacey Potter (15:29)
Well, it’s gonna be a top priority for me as soon as I sort of get my feet, find my feet here, right? It’s only week four. But it’s definitely a priority that we want to get this out as soon as possible. And there’s already been so much work done before I came. So it’s getting me up to speed and then, yeah, I’m just super excited. think it encourages more people to join sort of.

Yesenia (15:37)
Yeah

Stacey Potter (15:56)
Also celebrating those who have made us who we are so far as well. But then, you know, lots of people would love to become an ambassador that don’t know how to get started or things like that, right? And bringing more people into the fold.

Yesenia (16:09)
Love it, love it. Well, I look forward to seeing the announcement news and learning more about that. So for those folks listening, hopefully it’s released. Hopefully it’s in the works by the time you listen to this. All right, cool. We’re going to move over to the rapid fire. I just make noises because I don’t get, Krobe’s a fancy noise maker. So we’ll go with the flow with whatever my ADHD brain decides to do. And our first question, Disney or Pixar?

Stacey Potter (16:40)
Pixar for sure. I used to live like around the corner from Pixar, so, and I’ve always been a huge Pixar fan, but this is an acquired Pixar, so they’re one and the same now,

Yesenia (16:52)
In my heart, are they really?

Stacey Potter (16:55)
Yeah, no, in our hearts we know the truth, but Pixar, yeah.

Yesenia (17:02)
Dark or light mode?

Stacey Potter (17:05)
Dark.

Yesenia (17:06)
Dark as my soul.

Stacey Potter (17:09)
Black is the night.

Yesenia (17:11)
Cats or dogs? as she takes a sip of coffee.

Stacey Potter (17:15)
Both. I have two cats and a dog, and they’re all amazing. I love them both for very different reasons.

Yesenia (17:22)
Yeah, I can’t choose between my five, so.

Stacey Potter (17:26)
Oh wow. That’s a lot.

Yesenia (17:29)
Alright, this next question and it may cause chaos to our listeners, alright? Linux Mac or Windows?

Stacey Potter (17:38)
Well, I’m a non-coder, so, and I’m a Mac gal.

Yesenia (17:44)
Mac, there it is. Well, there you have it folks. It’s another rapid fire. Any last minute advice or thoughts for the audience you’d like to share?

Stacey Potter (17:53)
Well, I’ll do some shameless plugging of our upcoming events because I’d love to connect with you all in real life and these events are great places for our community to get together and share ideas and progress on the capabilities that make it easier to sustainably secure the open source software on which we all depend. You can find all of these listed on our website at openssf.org/events

So, we’re going to be hosting some upcoming events:

We’ve got Community Day Japan (in Tokyo) on June 18 – which is a colo event after KubeCon’s main event
CD North America will be in Denver on June 26 (as a colo event after Open Source Summit, which we are sponsoring so we’ll also have a booth at Open Source Summit)
CD India is August 4 in Hyderabad Co-located with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India
CD Europe will be in Amsterdam on August 28 (Open Source Summit, which we are sponsoring so we’ll also have a booth at Open Source Summit)
And Open Source SecurityCon is November 10 (colo event pre-KubeCon NA) which is a new event that fosters collaboration and shares innovation in cloud native security and open source software security. The Call for Proposals for this one opens mid May – so be on the lookout for that.

We’ll also be attending & sponsoring events for the remainder of the year as well:

We’re sponsoring, and thus have a booth at Open Source Summit North America in June (Colorado) Europe August 25-27
Blackhat & DefCon in Vegas in early August
We’re sponsoring, and thus have a booth at Open Source Summit Europe August 25-27
Sponsoring Open Source in Finance Forum in NYC October 21-22

I can’t wait to meet you all. I’m super excited to be here. And if you join us in Slack, please say hi. If you have any interest in any of our projects, I just encourage you to just jump in, right? Say hello. And usually that’s all it takes to get a really warm welcome from anyone in this community. And I look forward to working with all of you.

Yesenia (20:16)
There you have it from Stacey Potter. Thank you for your impact and contributions to our open source communities. I’m looking forward to the impact that you’ll have and how your ripple effects the open SSF being a part of it. Stacey, I appreciate your time and thank you.

Apr 22

Love0

What’s in the SOSS? Podcast #28 – S2E05 Secure Software Starts with Awareness: Education & Open Source with the Council of Daves

By OpenSSF Podcast

Summary

In this episode of What’s in the SOSS, host CRob is joined by the “Council of Daves” – Dr. David A. Wheeler of the OpenSSF and Dave Russo from Red Hat – for a deep dive into the intersection of secure software development and education. From their open source origin stories to the challenges of educating developers and managers alike, this conversation covers key initiatives like the LFD121 course, upcoming resources on the EU Cyber Resilience Act, and how AI is shifting the landscape.

Whether you’re a developer, manager, or just open source curious, this is your crash course in why security training matters more than ever.

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on Overcast Listen on Pocket Casts

Conversation Highlights

Intro & Meet the Council of Daves (0:16)
Open Source Origin Stories (1:22)
The Role of the Education SIG (4:05)
Why Secure Software Education Is Critical (6:30)
Inside the LFD121 Secure Development Course (8:01)
Training Managers on Secure SDLC Practices (12:24)
Why AI Makes Education More Important, Not Less (13:53)
What’s Next in Security Education: CRA 101 and More (16:04)
Rapid Fire Round: VI vs. EMACS, Tabs or Spaces & Mascots (20:20)
Final Thoughts & Call to Action (22:04)

Episode Links

Transcript

[Dave Russo] (0:00 – 0:16)
If you’re a people manager, understanding the amount of time and effort and skills that are needed to perform these different activities is vital to know.

[CRob] (0:16 – 0:46)
Hello and welcome to What’s in the SOSS, the OpenSSF’s podcast where we talk to interesting people from around the amazing open source ecosystem. I’m Krobe, your host. Today we have a real treat.

I’m joined by the Council of Daves and we’re going to talk about a topic that is near and dear to both our hearts, but let’s start off with some introductions. I’ll go with David Wheeler first, and then we’ll go to Dave Rousseau. So David, why don’t you introduce yourself real quick?

[David Wheeler] (0:47 – 1:03)
Okay, sure. David Wheeler. I work at the Open Source Security Foundation, OpenSSF, which is part of the Linux Foundation, and I’ve been involved in how do you develop secure software or developing open source software for literally decades.

[Dave Russo] (1:03 – 1:20)
My name is Dave Russo. I work at Red Hat on the product security team. I’m the governance portfolio manager.

I don’t have quite as long a history with open source as Dr. Wheeler does, but I’ve been working on SDLC related activities for quite some time.

[CRob] (1:22 – 1:33)
Awesome. I think we’re gonna have a great chat today about secure software development and education, but let’s get your open source origin stories. Dave Rousseau, how did you get involved in upstream open source?

[Dave Russo] (1:34 – 2:18)
So I was not directly involved in open source for very long in my previous arrangement. I did do some work in the software industry, then I was working in an industry that was not around development. So around 2016, when I joined Red Hat, my good friend Krobe introduced me to a lot of the awesome open source stuff that was going on in and around Red Hat and the upstreams a little bit prior to that.

And a lot of the conversation was aligned with SDLC activities, specifically secure development practices, which is an interest of mine. And then after joining Red Hat, obviously I became much more involved in a lot of different areas of open source, primarily around, again, secure development.

[CRob] (2:19 – 2:24)
Cool.

David Wheeler, how did you get involved? What’s your origin story?

[David Wheeler] (2:24 – 3:46)
That one’s a little challenging because I’ve been involved in it for such a long time, I don’t even remember the first time I gave, you know, I just just contributed to release some, well, what wasn’t called open source software, because the term hadn’t been invented yet.

People were occasionally sharing around source code. Since before I was born, frankly, they just didn’t use these terms. And, you know, necessarily have figured out some of the legal stuff.

So I think the big change to me, though, was the first time I held a very, very early version of Red Hat Linux in my hand. This is back when it was being distributed on CDs. Because at the time, there was a general agreement that yes, of course, people can share source code on, you know, on bulletin boards, and maybe this internet thing, but you couldn’t build something big with it.

And all of a sudden, an entire operating system was open source, and useful. And I think this is where instead of the, oh, sure, we can sometimes share with this, oh, this can be used for building large scale systems. And that was kind of the, and I later on did analysis of this and been doing things involving open source for quite well, since before the name was created.

[CRob] (3:46 – 4:04)
Cool. Well, thanks for sharing, gentlemen. So let’s dive into it.

Dave Russo, you are the current chair of the OpenSSF’s Education SIG, which is part of the BEST working group. Could you maybe talk a little bit about what the Education SIG is and what you all get into?

[Dave Russo] (4:05 – 4:27)
Sure. So the Education SIG is obviously around educating our open source developers to do a better job of incorporating security practices in the development and delivery of these projects. Now, a lot of my previous life experience was in development, so I’ve got a fairly good amount of experience in this area.

[David Wheeler] (4:28 – 4:39)
It is very obvious to a lot of people who’ve been doing this for a while that education has not been a focus area when it comes to developers, especially around security.

[Dave Russo] (4:40 – 6:17)
Developers are mostly interested in creating cool new stuff, which I completely agree with. That is the primary purpose is to put new features and functionality in their software to make it do more cool things, better, faster, stronger, etc. However, security for the longest time was not even a consideration for a lot of software development and delivery.

And over the past 10, maybe 15 years, there’s been a little bit more attention paid to it. But there’s been a movement to try and provide good education courses that talk about secure development practices to the development communities themselves. So at the Education SIG, what we are trying to do is help address that need.

We’re trying to help understand what kind of information and materials we can provide to our upstream communities to help the developers understand what it means when we talk about developing and delivering software more securely and specific techniques and ways that they can incorporate this into their projects, such as hardening guides, delivery guides, compiler rules, general awareness of some of the reasons behind having security, not only from a risk based perspective, just making the project a little bit more robust, but now also because of a lot of international regulations and expectations by different industries and geos that are compelling developers of various types to provide very specific attestations or statements of conformity when it comes to doing things in a certain way while they’re doing their development delivery.

[CRob] (6:17 – 6:30)
Awesome. So it sounds like, Dave, you touched on it a little bit. But David, could you maybe expand a little bit about you know, why do you feel it’s important to get this type of content in the hands of developers?

[David Wheeler] (6:30 – 8:01)
Well, I think the short answer is that if developers don’t know how to develop secure software, they won’t develop secure software. It really is that simple. I often tell people that we get software that’s more secure than we deserve.

Because why should we expect that software be secure when for the most part, developers aren’t told how to do that? It’s it’s it’s not a magic trick, but it does require some knowledge. By the way, we actually did a survey of developers about the state of secure software development education last year.

And I mean, we found that overall, you know, 28% of the professionals weren’t familiar with secure software development. It jumped up to 75% for those who had less than a year of experience because the colleges and universities for the most part, are not requiring it. And so yes, they they increasingly get it over on the job.

But the on the job is often spotty, it has holes. And by the time they become more knowledgeable, there’s more that have come in, again, with that lack of knowledge. And so we’re just constantly on this treadmill of people who don’t know how to do it.

And lack of training was the was one of the primary reasons that people gave for why don’t you know how to do this.

[CRob] (8:01 – 8:17)
So I’m aware that the SIG has a couple artifacts that they work on. The first thing we’ll talk about is the LFD 121 course. So maybe Dr. Wheeler, if you could give a little taste about what that is all about.

[David Wheeler] (8:18 – 8:30)
Absolutely. I’ll quickly note, by the way, both of my participants have used my title doctor, I do have a PhD. But my experience is when people use my title, they’re just yanking my chain.

[CRob] (8:30 – 8:32)
So we love you, sir.

[David Wheeler] (8:33 – 10:14)
Well, thank you. Yeah, so the so we’ve got a course called LFD 121, developing secure software.

Now, we’re here talking about open source. But I want to make sure everybody knows that this is absolutely for open source software. It’s also for closed source software.

It’s for anybody who develops software, because the frank reality is attackers don’t care what your license is. They just don’t. They just want to take over things and do bad stuff and make everyone stay miserable.

So we’re here to help developers deal with that. I just looked at the numbers and we have including, you know, up to now, for both our Japanese and English through edX and through TI, all these are, we’ve had over 30,000 in [Crob: Wow], in that course, which is, you know, fantastic. That’s a lot of people.

That’s a lot of people. So we’ve got a course, we very much focus on the practical, how do you do stuff. And we have optional hands on labs, they’re not required.

But we do encourage people at least do a few. Because doing things hands on is really, really helpful. I’ll do a quick note.

Some people have gotten the wrong impression that security is always expensive. Generally, that’s not true. It’s retrofitting security.

That’s expensive. And so what we should be doing is stopping the retrofit. It’s not hard to do most of the stuff if you just know ahead of time what you’re supposed to do.

But once you once you’ve dug the hole deep, it’s very hard to get out.

[CRob] (10:15 – 10:21)
Speaking of security, not being expensive. This sounds like an amazing class. How much does it cost to take?

[David Wheeler] (10:23 – 10:48)
Oh, what a pitch. Of course, as you know, it’s completely free. The course is free, the labs are free, whole thing’s free.

So, you know, please don’t please don’t make costs a limiting factor for this. You know, it’s basically important for us all around the world that anybody who develops software knows the basics. And that’s what this this particular course covers.

[CRob] (10:49 – 11:08)
So a big part of your world, Dave Russo, is, you know, secure software development and SDLC, secure development lifecycle. From your perspective, you’ve looked at the LFD 121 class. What do you find that to be a useful artifact as you’re sharing it with your engineers?

It is.

[Dave Russo] (11:08 – 12:23)
The content in the course does a very good job at talking about what the different activities that should take place along the different times of the software lifecycle should be. And again, to kind of repeat from what we said earlier, awareness is a big problem that we have. A lot of developers don’t understand what it means when we say we should develop things securely.

And then you start using words like risk assessment, penetration testing, threat modeling, attack surface analysis, and people’s eyes just kind of glaze over because they have no idea what you’re talking about. The course is able to go into these topics and provide a good amount of information, provide an understanding to a developer what we mean when we talk about these sorts of things. And additionally, to David’s point earlier, making the developers aware of this early so they can build it into the plan instead of trying to go back and do it after certain things have been done, makes adopting and implementing these things much, much easier.

So the combination of knowing what these activities actually are, the amount of effort that is needed to complete them, and when to insert them into the lifecycle make the course absolutely invaluable for people who are doing software development.

[CRob] (12:24 – 12:38)
That was one of the OG projects that David Wheeler brought into the foundation. Let’s talk about some of the more current work. Who would like to talk about the security for developer manager class we’ve all been working on?

[Dave Russo] (12:38 – 13:52)
So I’ll go and I’ll start off from a general level. And then I’ll let David go into some things a little bit more in depth. So the intent of the secure software development for managers course is to again, inform.

Awareness is a problem. If I’m a development manager, and someone says to me, you need to do your stuff securely, what does that mean? There’s a lot of different factors involved.

From a risk perspective, if we don’t do these activities, what does that mean? What does it mean for the actual software itself? What does it mean for the organization or company that I work for?

What kind of risk may be exposing the company to? More importantly, if you’re a people manager, understanding the amount of time and effort and skills that are needed to perform these different activities is vital to know. You need to understand when to put these things into roadmaps and timelines, how much time to allocate for them.

And does anybody on your team actually know what it means to do, for example, a penetration test? If not, you’re going to need to find some additional resources to help you with that. So again, not necessarily diving down into the deep weeds on a lot of these topics.

This is meant to provide additional awareness and understanding to someone who’s in a development manager position.

[David Wheeler] (13:53 – 16:04)
And if I can jump in with some additions. Fundamentally, if management’s not on board, it’s probably not going to happen.

And unfortunately, some managers are kind of assuming things like, well, the the IT security department will somehow take care of it. Well, no, they won’t. They certainly do have an important role to play.

There are things that they that they will do that will be very, very helpful. But if you’re managing the development of software, there are things that you as a manager need to know need to do need to make possible. We spend more than a little time in the course helping you understand some terminology, understanding what needs to happen, and frankly, making sure one of the key things a manager needs to do is making sure that the developers know what they need to know.

In many organizations, managers aren’t necessarily writing the code, but they need to make sure that the people they’re bringing in know what they need to know. And if they don’t, fixing that with what is fundamentally a training problem, an education problem. Because just like any other field, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re not likely to do a good job.

And it doesn’t mean that they’re stupid. It just means that they lack some important information. I will quickly note, just because I’m thinking of it.

Lots of people talking about AI. AI is awesome. The majority of developers nowadays are using AI to develop code, according to some surveys.

And here’s the problem. Just because some AI generated code does not make it secure code. What do you think that that system was trained on?

Right. So this actually AI is actually increasing the need for education by developers and by their managers. Because if you’re using an AI system, who is going to be reviewing it?

Not just the AI, I hope. You’re going to need people to know what they’re doing. Which brings us back to the need for more education.

The increased need for education, not the decreased need because of AI.

[CRob] (16:04 – 16:15)
Excellent point. Broadly, what other things are on the horizon from an education perspective? What do you got in the hopper in the back? It’s going to come down the road.

[David Wheeler] (16:18 – 16:20)
Well, Dave, you want to go ahead?

[Dave Russo] (16:20 – 18:23)
Sure. So the USSF is putting a lot of attention on education.

There’s some expectations as to what our SIG can help contribute moving forward in 2025. And again, I’ll hit this from an awareness perspective, I think, and I’ll let David dive in to a couple things a little bit deeper. We need to get the message out.

We need to get information out there into the upstream communities and the projects and let them know what it is we’re trying to accomplish and what materials we already have that they could leverage and use right now, as well as understanding how to bring more people into the group, into the USSF in general, and provide their subject matter expertise to help us generate even more materials on top of that.

So we’re going to be making some additions to the information we’ve got on our GitHub page and such. We’re going to try and socialize some of the things that we’ve already put together as a group, some of the hardening guides we’ve done, we already talked about some of the education courses that are being worked on. We’re taking a little bit of a look right now, something that’s in progress, a little bit of behind the curtain for everybody.

We’re working on a CRA 101 course. Again, the EU Cyber Resiliency Act has been passed by their parliament, and everyone is trying to understand exactly what that means to them. So we’re trying to put, again, a general information course together that makes it digestible for people with a couple different types of roles to understand what the CRA means and what the expectations are going to be moving forward as it begins to come into effect.

So these regulations are becoming more common. There’s a couple other ones that are in progress at various geographies around the world, so we expect we’re probably going to do this for a couple other ones as they become available. Hopefully, we’ll have some representatives speaking at certain conferences, talking about the OSSF mission in general, some of the education information in particular, and again, trying to make sure that we are looking at the right ways to bring the right information to our constituency.

David?

[David Wheeler] (18:24 – 20:18)
Yeah, so let me jump in specifically on the Cyber Resilience Act, which is kind of a big thing that’s coming up. Strictly speaking, it only applies to software, and so on, that is released to the EU market.

I guess more accurately, I should say products with digital elements, which is the term of art that they use within the regulation. But the reality is, Europe’s a big place. Most organizations, especially in the software world, are global.

So this is going to affect many, many, many. Indeed, it’ll affect many who have never really needed to look at this kind of thing before. And so we’ve been trying to develop this, what we’ve been calling a CRA 101.

We actually even have an official number for it, it’s LFEL 1001, when it’ll get released. But basically, it’s a little introduction, explanation, what does this say? What does it require?

And it’s going to be a big change, I think, to industry, to the market. It even has some requirements specifically on what’s called open source software stewards. It’s a relatively light touch, but it does impose some requirements.

It does talk about open source software developers. I think in many cases, it will be much less of a touch, but it’s not completely none. And so this is going to affect, and of course, people who develop open source software, that software usually gets pulled into larger systems in many cases.

So this is going to affect a lot of folks. And so it’s gonna be important for us all to be prepared. So we’ve been working very hard to get that introduction developed, and we’re hoping to get that out the door as soon as we can.

[CRob] (20:20 – 20:43)
Excellent. Well, I’m looking forward to taking it, so I can become smart about the CRA. Thank you, gentlemen.

Let’s move on to the rapid fire part of the interview. All right. I got a couple wacky questions, and I would like you both to answer the first thing that comes to your mind.

First, most important question. VI or EMACS?

[Dave Russo] (20:43 – 20:44)
VI.

[David Wheeler] (20:44 – 20:45)
VIM.

[CRob] (20:46 – 20:54)
Excellent answer. Now, the next one, potentially even more controversial.

Tabs or spaces?

[David Wheeler] (20:55 – 20:56)
Spaces.

[Dave Russo] (20:56 – 20:56)
Spaces.

[David Wheeler] (20:58 – 20:59)
Always spaces.

[CRob] (20:59 – 21:09)
I can go back and count, but that is a very contentious, verging on religion for many people. What’s your favorite open source mascot?

[Dave Russo] (21:11 – 21:11)
Tux the Penguin.

[David Wheeler] (21:12 – 21:14)
Oh, it’s it’s hard to beat Tux.

[CRob] (21:16 – 21:17)
Classic.

[David Wheeler] (21:18 – 21:27)
Classic.

I’m planning to print up one on a 3D printer soon, because Tux is fun. But I will say that Honk the Goose. Honk the Goose?

[CRob] (21:28 – 21:28)
Honk the Goose.

[David Wheeler] (21:28 – 21:29)
He is a kind of fun goose.

[CRob] (21:29 – 21:36)
I am personally a fan of the goose. And last question. What’s your favorite vegetable?

[Dave Russo] (21:37 – 21:38)
None of the above.

[David Wheeler] (21:39 – 21:43)
I’ll count corn as a vegetable. Corn on the cob.

[CRob] (21:43 – 22:04)
There you go. Thank you, gentlemen.

Now, as we wrap up, do you have a call to action or some advice you’d like to share with our listeners who are where they have a lot of people across the industry that listen to this newcomers or people that aren’t familiar with open source or cyber security? So what kind of advice or what call to action do you have for our listeners?

[Dave Russo] (22:04 – 22:31)
Get involved.

Get involved. Understand what’s out there. The OpenSSF has a lot of really good information, a lot of different working groups that are going through things that affect all the open source communities, trying to, you know, make our security better, reach farther, make us more proficient in those areas. So if there’s something you think you contribute or if it’s something you want to learn or just want to listen and see what’s going on, join a couple of the working group calls and see what’s happening.

[CRob] (22:32 – 22:34)
Excellent. David?

[David Wheeler] (22:34 – 23:41)
I’ve got a couple.

So for get involved, if you’re interested in security, open source and security, obviously OpenSSF, if you are the happy user of an open source project where it’s starting to become important to you, get involved in that project. If you are a developer of software, please, please learn how to develop secure software. I think our course is great.

I don’t really care if you take that course per se. If you take another course, that’s great. Because what’s more important is all of society now depends on software.

We need that software to be more secure. And the vast, vast, vast majority of the problems we’re seeing today are the same problems we’ve been having for decades. It’s well understood how to systemically counter them.

But people need to know how to do it first. And I, I don’t, as I said earlier, AI is not going to change that. AI will simply mean that we can write bad code faster.

It means we can write good code faster. But to write the good code, the humans have to know what good code looks like.

[CRob] (23:43 – 24:05)
Well, what a difference some Daves make. Gentlemen, some of my favorite people to collaborate with. I appreciate your time and all of your contributions to help trying to improve the quality of life for open source developers and ultimately the users that use all that amazing software.

So that’s a wrap. Thank you all for joining What’s in the SOSS and happy security, everybody.

(24:09 – 24:46)
Like what you’re hearing? Be sure to subscribe to What’s in the SOSS on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Antenapod, Pocketcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. There’s a lot going on with the OpenSSF and many ways to stay on top of it all.

Check out the newsletter for open source news, upcoming events and other happenings. Go to OpenSSF.org slash newsletter to subscribe. Connect with us on LinkedIn for the most up to date OpenSSF news and insight and be a part of the OpenSSF community at OpenSSF.org slash get involved. Thanks for listening, and we’ll talk to you next time on What’s in the SOSS.

Apr 15

Love0

What’s in the SOSS? Podcast #27 – S2E04 Enterprise to Open Source: Steve Fernandez’s Journey to the OpenSSF

By OpenSSF Podcast

Summary

In this episode of What’s in the SOSS, we sit down with the OpenSSF’s new General Manager, Steve Fernandez — a seasoned enterprise tech leader whose resumé spans giants like L’Oréal, Coca-Cola, AIG, and Ford. Steve shares his “origin story,” what drew him into the world of open source, and how his decades of experience as a consumer of open source software are shaping his vision for the Foundation.

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on Overcast Listen on Pocket Casts

Conversation Highlights

00:21 Welcome & Introductions
00:57 Steve’s Tech Journey
03:13 Why OpenSSF?
05:02 The Role of Security & Strategic Vision
08:17 Rapid Fire & Final Thoughts

Episode Links

Transcript

CRob (00:21)
Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is What’s in the SOSS, the OpenSSF’s podcast where we talk to developers, industry experts, and assorted amazing people within our open source ecosystem. I’m CRob, one of your co-hosts for this little event. I do security stuff on the internet, and today we have a new friend to introduce the world to, Steve Fernandez, who just recently joined the foundation.

And Steve, maybe you could talk a little bit about, introduce yourself and maybe talk about your technology origin story.

Steve Fernandez (00:57)
Thanks a lot and great introduction, by the way. So pleasure to meet everybody. My name is Steve Fernandez and as CRob mentioned, I’m the new general manager for the OpenSSF. And I come to this place through a long IT journey. For the last 30 years, I’ve been mainly on the enterprise side of the IT game.

I’ve done various roles as CIO and CTO in many different industries as well as many different companies. Most recently, before I came to the OpenSSF, I was the CIO for NCR Voyix, and previous to that, I was Chief Technology Officer for L’Oreal in Paris, Chief Technology Officer for AIG in the insurance industry.

I was chief technology officer at Coca-Cola and then I worked many years inside of GE and Ford Motor Company in different technology roles. So I really come to this job, I think, with a different and unique perspective than many who’ve been in the open source world for forever. I’m coming as a user of the open source and it’s been a user of the software and the technology inside of all the platforms that I’ve run and managed over the last 30 years. So I’m very excited to take a little different view of technology in this role and hoping a lot of my experience from running enterprise and running large scale platforms and running things day to day is going to translate into growth for the organization and further stability as we move forward.

CRob (02:43)
And, we’ve cited here and at other events, just the penetration of open source in normal operations and just how critical open source is to a lot of enterprises. So I’m very excited to kind of benefit from the experiences you’ve had in your long and successful career and trying to help bring that more business focus to us. But I’m curious, what drew you to the OpenSSF? Was it the goose?

Steve Fernandez (03:13)
I think it could have been the goose, which is quite the great icon. You know, it was a, it’s really interesting for me personally. I was getting to a point in my life where I’ve done many, many operational roles throughout my life and my career. And I was taking a little break and trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grow up and what I wanted to do next on the journey. And, you know, it’s one of those small things, a friend of a friend talked to me about this position and I said, hmm being general manager of a foundation. Well, I can at least take a look and see what it’s about. And, and, uh, I don’t know, it’s something I’ve never done before, but I think it might make sense. So I sat down with, uh, Jim Zemlin, uh, head of the Linux foundation. And we just had a great conversation and being an open source user throughout my career and knowing the importance of open source and security you know, to every company’s platform, to every company’s install base. It really was a job that I was looking for where I thought I could do some good for the community. I thought I could, like I said earlier, take a different perspective on things, add a little bit of my corporate background to the organization and merge the two together.

Steve Fernandez (04:31)
So for me, it was really about trying something new, experimenting – bring a little bit of your old experience into a new environment. And I have to say, in just the last month that I’ve been here, it’s been an exceptional experience and working with absolutely great people, working with a great community. So, so far it’s been a really, really positive experience and a bit different from my enterprise days, but at the same time, very exciting and it’s great to be involved in real technology.

CRob (05:02)
So it’s interesting you have a long history of kind of helping lead technology organizations. From your perspective, how have you seen security kind of help the business and how does security help developers and other consumers?

Steve Fernandez (05:18)
Yeah, so I’ve always called security kind of the hidden greatness. It’s one of those things that you don’t know you need security until you know you need security.

CRob (05:30) Yeah.

Steve Fernandez (05:31)
And on the enterprise side of the game, it’s your constant worry about security and risk. And you’re always worrying about your platforms. You’re always worried about your products. You’re always worried about making sure that things that you’re presenting to the consumer or to the employee or to, you know, the different install bases, you have an inherent need to make sure your products and your technology are secure. So I’ve always had a love hate with it because you hate to spend incredible amounts of time and investment in security, but you absolutely love it because it keeps you safe and, and, and makes sure that your products and your technology are going to…with it – you know, there are bad actors out there and people do want to get into your products. They do want to find out, you know, personal information. So security is that thing that makes us feel a little bit better. And it lowers your risk profile. And, you know, it’s really the glue that’s needed inside of a technology base.

CRob (06:37)
Mm-hmm.

And thinking about your experiences in your past roles, what do you see, kind of, the additional value and capabilities you’re going to bring to the foundation to help us further our mission?

Steve Fernandez (06:51)
Well, I’m thinking, you what I found in the foundation last month and working with people is we have an incredible set of people and we have an incredible set of technical sales and also have like a really unique community that works together in, you know, in a matrix like organization, but it really works and people are all, you know, moving forward to do what they think is the right thing.

I think what I’m going to try to bring to the foundation from my past is a little bit of strategic vision, a little bit of process, a little bit of thought process at a methodical level so that we best utilize the people that we have and the capabilities that we have. One of the great things I felt as I came into the organization and I’ve been doing my original first month assessment is, you know, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We just got to get efficient. We got to make sure our priorities are in line. We need to make sure we work with our enterprise partners. We need to make sure we work with our development community. And I think my job is going to be bringing those different pieces together and working a little bit more seamlessly.

So, that’s really, think, where I’ll add value and a little bit of my past will help out the organization.

CRob (08:17)
Excellent. Well, I can say personally, I’m very excited to be collaborating with you on this mission. And I know our community is very excited to be working with you. But let’s move on to the rapid fire part of our session. Are you ready for rapid, rapid, rapid fire? I got a couple of wacky questions I’m going to ask you just off the cuff answers. What’s your favorite vegetable?

Steve Fernandez (08:40)
Broccoli

CRob (08:42)
Okay, that is a perfectly fine vegetable. Thinking about the amazing open source ecosystem, what’s your favorite open source mascot?

Steve Fernandez (08:51)
The Goose.

CRob (08:53)
The goose, that’s an excellent answer. And mild or spicy food?

Steve Fernandez (08:59)
Spicy as it can get.

CRob (09:00)
Ohhhh, that’s spicy. Nice. And final and probably most important question. Star Trek or Star Wars?

Steve Fernandez (09:11)
Gotta go Trek.

CRob (09:12)
Excellent. Both answers are great, but that’s a fine, fine answer. Thank you, thank you. Well, Steve, as we wind down, do you have any kind of parting thoughts, any words of wisdom that you want to share with our community?

Steve Fernandez (09:29)
You know, I just say to the community, mostly keep the passion alive that you have for the work you’re doing. It’s very apparent when somebody new to the community sees it, you know, especially like myself. I see the passion. I see the intelligence. I see the hard work. And I think you should all feel very proud about that work that you’re doing. It really shows and it’s really transparent to everybody.

So, you know, I’m here to work with you. I’m here to collaborate. I’m here to help drive whatever I can do to better the community. So in that spirit, just please be open with everybody. Feel free to contact me at any time if you have ideas or thoughts about how we can improve the community or how we can move forward. That’s very important to me and I want to work in this know, great environment and, you know, and really help it grow and really foster that security community that we built and continue to do so. So I just say keep working hard and it’s going great.

CRob (10:35)
Thank you very much Steve Fernandez. Thank you for joining us and thank you for spending your time today with what’s in the SOSS and to our audience Happy open sourcing. We’ll talk to you soon

(10:47)
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.

Apr 08

Love0

What’s in the SOSS? Podcast #26 – S2E03 JavaScript’s Big Footprint: Robin Bender Ginn on Leading OpenJS and Open Source at Scale

By OpenSSF Podcast

Summary

Robin Bender Ginn, Executive Director of the OpenJS Foundation, joins us to talk about JavaScript’s massive footprint, the challenges of sustaining critical open source projects, and the importance of security in the web ecosystem. She shares her journey, insights on community-led development, and how OpenJS is building a healthier future for the JavaScript ecosystem.

Learn more and register for JSConf North America: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/jsconf-north-america/register/

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on Overcast Listen on Pocket Casts

Conversation Highlights

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

Episode Links

Transcript

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.

Mar 25

Love0

What’s in the SOSS? Podcast #25 – S2E02 Empowering Security: Yesenia Yser on Open Source, AI, and Personal Branding

By OpenSSF Podcast

Summary

In this inspiring episode of “What’s in the SOSS?”, we welcome our new Co-Host, cybersecurity expert and open source advocate Yesenia Yser. Join hosts CRob and Yesenia as they delve into her compelling journey from discovering open source at Red Hat to pioneering AI security at Microsoft. Learn how Yesenia blends her passion for cybersecurity, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and empowering communities—especially women—to shape her personal brand and advocacy efforts. Don’t miss this lively conversation full of actionable insights for anyone interested in cybersecurity, open source communities, and personal growth.

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on Overcast Listen on Pocket Casts

Conversation Highlights

00:18 – Introduction to Yesenia Yser
00:55 – Yesenia’s open source origin story
03:30 – From cybersecurity professional to jiu-jitsu practitioner
05:56 – Building a personal brand in tech and beyond
09:04 – Advocating diversity in tech through the BEAR group
12:40 – Fun rapid-fire round (VI or Emacs, Coke or Pepsi, favorite open source mascot, spicy vs. mild food, and more)
13:52 – Yesenia joins as new co-host of “What’s in the SOSS?”
15:39 – Advice for breaking into open source and cybersecurity

Episode Links

Transcript

Soundbite – Yesenia Yser
One thing that you’ll hear me advocate over and over again is to find an open source project that will support your career growth. Whether you’re looking to go into program management, business analyst, management, or your technical skills, find a project that aligns with you. You can jump on the open source Slack and hit up in general, just say, I’m interested in doing this, this, this. This is how many hours I have. And I bet you someone’s going to be.

Hey, come over to our group, join us. We’ll teach you along the way. That’s the best thing I know about open source and the tech is that folks are very open to teach.

Intro – CRob (00:18)
Hello and Welcome to “What’s in the SOSS?” OpenSSF’s podcast where we talk to interesting people throughout the open source ecosystem. My name is CRob, one of your hosts, and today we have an incredible treat. I’m talking to a very dear friend of mine and amazing open source contributor, Yesenia. We have some amazing news to share at the end of the podcast today.

CRob (00:49):
Yesi, please introduce yourself to the audience and tell us about your open source origin story.

Yesenia Yser (00:54):
Hey everyone! Thank you for those listening. I’m Yesenia, born and raised in Miami, South Florida. I’m Cuban American, I’ve been in the cyber tech industry for over 12 years, a bachelor’s in computer science, and a master’s in digital forensics. I usually like to joke that I “social engineered” my way into my first security role. It was always interesting because in school I used a bunch of tools that were online and free.
My first couple of jobs, we used a bunch of libraries and things of that nature. It wasn’t until my time at Red Hat, which was like six years into my career that I realized what I was actually using and that it was open source and there was a huge community of great and amazing folks behind it that are part of it. So from there, I started exploring open source more exploring OpenSSF, a community that I do a lot of, advocacy work and contribution to. But it was just, it was very interesting that for someone that uses it, this is just, you know, everyday person that’s like learning how to code. You bring in Python, you import your libraries and you got to keep them up to date every now and then. And you don’t really know where they come from, but they come from a little black hole that’s called the open source space. Then, my journey took me from Red Hat. worked at the Linux foundation on the Alpha-Omega project. So I was helping with the Omega piece of it and we, in which we were automating, security vulnerability identification and open source software. Then my career took me to Microsoft where right now I’m working on artificial intelligence and open source security research. In that space, I get to explore both AI from the large tech industry and all the threats and yumminess that is in this emerging new technology. And then I get to share my love and passion for open source.

CRob (02:48):
That’s awesome. And as we mentioned, you and I both work together at Red Hat, where you were the very first supply chain security engineer. So I am a little bit more up to speed with your background than other folks may be. But, I think what I find very fascinating about you is that you not only are an amazing technologist and super smart, but you also have a lot of outside of work activities that I find very fascinating. Could you maybe talk about how things like your passion for jiu-jitsu and outside activities kind of inform your practice around open source security and AI security?

Yesenia (03:30):
Yeah. So starting at Red Hat was pretty, pretty cool. I was there as the first supply chain security engineer. A very big breach happened called SolarWinds, in which it blew up the supply chain security space for the industry. So, it was really great to be in the forefront of that in such a big company that is big and open source and be able to see all the plethora of things that happened in the wild wild west that is the development industry.

So outside of work is usually what I like to say about my day job. So by the day, I’m a security professional. By night, I’m a jiujiteira, which means a jiu-jitsu practitioner. I’ve been working, I’ve been training and teaching jiu-jitsu for almost seven years now. Started with the kids and working with them. And it was just lovely to see their faces bright light up when they learned a new technique. And over the years I’ve seen parallels between jiu-jitsu and my own cyber career, in which I became a mirror of things that I was seen as myself in a leader in the cyberspace that was holding me back. And then that was being mirrored into my jiu-jitsu. A year or so ago, I started a nonprofit called the Lioness Instincts, in which our mission is to empower women to protect themselves both physically and digitally, because as a security professional and a presented to jiu-jitsu instructor, which we would teach women’s self-defense classes and teach kids. I saw a huge boost in just their self-confidence and being able to work through some of the traumas that does happen through some of the crazy things that happen throughout the world. So we started the nonprofit. And if I’m not in the cyber world, I’m on the mat teaching and training. I also have two dogs that I teach and you’ll see me with them as well.

They’re their own plethora of tricks and cuteness.

CRob (05:25):
That’s awesome. And I know how much this kind of outside advocacy and your jiu-jitsu kind of affects, know, it colors your thinking and how you conduct yourself. Let’s think about this. I know you’ve kind of taken this and kind of started to develop a personal brand around these types of things. Can you maybe say why it’s important for people to find these opportunities and these passions and kind of try to do this for themselves? How does this personal branding help you?

Yesenia (05:56):
Yes. So for me, it’s my personal brand. And for those that follow, I’m called cyber jiujiteira online because of the mixture of, me, gives me a purpose and an avenue. And usually when I make a decision of something that I’m going to do, I ask myself, does it match or fit my brand? And my brand has its own pillars of advocacy as it has its five, has its five pillars, which is, cybersecurity and promoting advocacy, education and guidance to get more folks into the industry. There’s just the empowerment, self-defense, digital privacy piece that involves digital and the physical side, teaching and lessons, motivation, and then lifestyles. Because I normally talk to folks and they’re like, you have a very interesting lifestyle of just working in training, working in training, and then running a nonprofit. So I feel like a brand helps you not only keep because I have ADHD, so I’m all over the place, but it helps me keep aligned with what I’m doing and then ensuring that I can go back to it when it comes to social media platforms, it helps people know who I am and what I stand for. So I’ve been in conferences, both physical, like for jiu-jitsu things, and then for cybersecurity things or open source. And they’re like, you’re the jiu-jitsu girl. You’re the cyber girl. So it’s great. I’m like, yeah, you know me.

It becomes a cool way for folks to connect with you on a more personal level, and understand who you are. And in that, once you hear that you understand that I’m a martial artist and any thoughts around martial artists, you relate it to me in a, in a way. So martial artists tend to be disciplined. They tend to be focused. They tend to have patience. So as an individual that’s applying to cybersecurity roles that are fast pacing, working with executives. Things are constantly moving. You have to adapt quickly. The mindset of a martial artist, I think, falls very well into that, which helps with interviewing. And somebody said it the other day, which I think is great for branding, is your brand should be getting you the interviews. So instead of you searching out for these interviews, your brand should be helping you acquire what’s right for you.

And it’s just very important when you’re networking and connecting with folks that your brand speaks on who you are, whether or not you’re in the room.

CRob (08:29):
Excellent. Yeah. And thank you for all you do for especially, you know, late getting ladies into cyber and talking about self-defense. I think that’s amazing contribution back given back. We get to work together in the open SSF as part of a group that also has a lot of very strong advocacy bent to it. So maybe could you talk a little bit about the bear group that we participate in and you know, why is it so important to kind of bring awareness and kind of reach out to people that may not be currently in this career path of this world.

Yesenia (09:03):
Yes. So the BEAR, I think what we’re doing in the group is great. So bear stands for belonging.The E is empowerment, is for allyship and R is for representation. And I, I strongly feel very passionate about this because in the open source space, let’s just start with the challenges. A lot of the times are open source maintainers. They created this when they were younger. It was a college project. It was just a fun idea that they had and somehow it went very mainstream. It went viral, blew up, and now is in 80 to 90 % of software that’s out there, right? So we have this one tool that’s maintained by one person who probably has a family, who probably works two or three jobs. And it’s crucial to everything from US government infrastructure to maybe you know, outside sources to big tech company, industries. So the idea of Bayer is to be able to make that bridge a little bit easier for folks. Cause I know myself when I was starting, as I mentioned earlier, I didn’t know what open source was. was just like, okay, some cool thing that I can pull from online, but having these like community office hours, which we do once a month, we get to highlight different areas of like how to get started into space, how to look for mentorships.

We talk about your branding and how to get that. And we just highlight a lot of amazing voices in the community and that we are associated with to bring out different representations and ideas that will help folks understand how to get into the industry. This is also for folks already in the industry, because if you want to give back or you have knowledge that’s very important, you can set up your own mentorship. You can join our community and plan different events.

We’re looking to also host conversations at different OpenSSF and open source community conferences. And this advocacy is important because it’s going to give maintainers and open source contributors a little bit of extra break room to bring more folks in. One of the biggest issues you hear is that people just don’t have time. But if they have an individual…it’s willing to take on a task, right? And it doesn’t have to be a coding task. It can be writing documentation to make it easier for other people to use it. It could be updating the website. It could be a plethora of different skills that doesn’t require coding that can assist the maintainer in coming on. And we can just improve our open source software and tools usage.

CRob (11:43):
Yeah, it’s an, love the mission of the bear group and I love kind of the, how we’re moving forward with the community office hours. I think it’s been really impactful to kind of give these different perspectives and try to help have a very broad contributor base and help people break into something that sometimes there’s a lot of obstacles to, right?

Yesenia (12:04):
There’s a lot. And if you’ve missed any of the previous ones, they’re on YouTube. You can check them out and join us on Slack and ask, know, questions. We’ll be willing to either make a community office hours specific for that or just answer your questions right there on Slack. Even if you’re looking for a project.

CRob (12:23):
Cool. Well, let’s move on to the rapid fire part of the interview. All right. I have a couple of wacky questions. You probably don’t want to be drinking a drink when I ask you this. We don’t need any spit takes, but first question, VI or Emacs.

Yesenia (12:42):
VI or Emacs, we’re going to go with VI.

CRob (12:45):
Nice. Excellent, excellent. There are no wrong answers.

Yesenia (12:49):
Here. Haha.

CRob (12:52):
Next question, Coke or Pepsi? Yes, there was a right answer for that one and you’ve got it. Who’s your favorite open source mascot?

Yesenia (12:54):
CRob with the goose hat.

CRob (13:05):
CRob the goose hat?! Haha.

I don’t think you have a tattoo of that one yet though.

Yesenia (13:11):
Yet, but the one I do have a tattoo is Tux

CRob (13:15):
Very nice. What’s your favorite adult beverage?

Yesenia (13:19):
Coffee. This place is coffee.

CRob (13:23):
Yum yum yum. Love me some coffee. And last rapid fire question, spicy or mild food?

Yesenia (13:31):
None of the above. I’m Cuban. We don’t do spicy. It all hurts. haha.

CRob (13:39):
Fair enough.

Yesenia (13:40):
Seasoned, seasoned with a dull.

CRob (13:43):
Okay, excellent.

Well, thank you for playing rapid fire. So before I move on to our last question, I wanted to let the audience know that Yacinia is going to be joining us as a featured co-host of What’s in the SOSS. So you’re going to see her talking to some other amazing, interesting people. Do you want to give us kind of a little taste of what you, kind of the types of topics or people you’re interested in exploring as you’re going through and doing interviews?

Yesenia (14:11):
Yeah, I’m just interested in getting folks in the open source community and then external that may not even be aware that they’re using open source or how they can get involved. Our upcoming community office hours is going to bring in some amazing voices. But really just anybody that’s interested in speaking, speaking in the open source, talking about their journey in any shape or form or bringing in some technical coolness that, you know, like to spice up the SOSS, right?

So if you are interested… Was that the play if I said spicy? Yeah, I had feeling that was going be the audio.

Yeah, just looking at my list, but, once I post, this episode or just a general call for action, I’ll keep the community up to date, but if anyone listening to this is interested or has an awesome voice that they would love to share the space with, let me know.

CRob (15:11):
Yeah, I think this is going to be really amazing. Kind of reaching out to new voices and perspectives and just kind of broadening the awareness of the things the foundation does and the importance of open source security. So thank you for joining us. Yeah. And to that end, as we launch you off on your new endeavor, what’s your call to action or what advice do you have for people trying to get into this crazy field of cyber and open source security?

Yesenia (15:24):
Thank you for having me.

One thing that you’ll hear me advocate over and over again is to find an open source project that will support your career growth. Whether you’re looking to go into program management, business analyst, management, or your technical skills, find a project that aligns with you. You can jump on the open source Slack and hit up in general, just say, I’m interested in doing this, this, this. This is how many hours I have. And I bet you someone’s going to be.

Hey, come over to our group, join us. We’ll teach you along the way. That’s the best thing I know about open source and the tech is folks are very open to teach.

CRob (16:18):
Well, again, thank you for joining us today and thank you for volunteering to help us co-host the podcast. And we look forward with eager anticipation to the amazing interviews you’re going to do for us. And with that, it’s a wrap. Thank you all for joining us today.

Yesenia (16:29):
It’s going to be amazing. Thank you.

CRob (16:38):
Thank you.

Outro (18:40):
Enjoyed the podcast? Subscribe to “What’s in the SOSS?” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, or your favorite platform. Stay updated with OpenSSF news and events by subscribing to our newsletter at openssf.org/newsletter. Join the OpenSSF community at openssf.org/get-involved, and connect with us on LinkedIn.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on “What’s in the SOSS?”

Mar 11

Love0

What’s in the SOSS? Podcast #24 – S2E01 OpenSSF MVVSR Overview

By OpenSSF Podcast

Summary

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.

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on Overcast Listen on Pocket Casts

Conversation Highlights

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

Episode Links

Transcript

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:

Catalyst for Change – Building tools for open source developers to meet security goals.
Educate & Empower the Modern Developer – Providing guides, courses, and best practices.
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.

Jan 07

Love0

What’s in the SOSS? Podcast #23 – Kusari’s Michael Lieberman Talks GUAC, SLSA and Securing the Open Source Supply Chain

By OpenSSF Podcast

Summary

CRob is joined by Michael Lieberman, CTO and co-founder of Kusari, about the importance of supply chain security in the open source ecosystem. They discuss Michael’s journey in open source, his contributions to projects like SLSA and GUAC and the future of supply chain security.

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on Overcast Listen on Pocket Casts

Conversation Highlights

01:56 – Michael explains how he got into open source
04:10 – The challenges of being a startup within the open source ecosystem
05:38 – Michael digs into his participation with SLSA and GUAC
09:13 – How maintainers can address SBOMs with GUAC
10:56 – Michael’s predictions for supply chain security and dependency management
14:26 – Michael answers CRob’s rapid-fire questions
15:32 – Advice for those entering the cybersecurity or open source development spaces
17:50 – Michael’s call to action

Episode Links

Transcript

Michael Lieberman soundbite (00:01)
I think for the downstream consumers, it’s one thing to do the security. It’s another thing to have folks who are consuming the software know, yes, I feel confident that they’re actually doing the right things because I’m getting signed in an atttested documentation that I can tie back to the maintainers.

CRob (00:18)
Hello, everybody. I’m CRob. I do security stuff on the internet, amongst other things, and I also am a community member and chief security architect for the Open Source Security Foundation. And one of the amazing things I get to do is host “What’s in the SOSS?” podcast, where I talk to interesting people, whether they’re developers or leaders, policy people in and around the open source software ecosystem.

And today we have a pretty cool treat, my friend Michael Lieberman from Kusari. I’ve had the chance to work with Michael for a couple of years within the OpenSSF, and we’re going to talk today about supply chain security and other topics. But before we do that, Michael, why don’t you introduce yourself to the audience?

Michael Lieberman (01:07)
Sure. Yeah. So I’m Michael Lieberman, and I’m CTO and co-founder of a startup called Kusari, focused in supply chain security, but also very much focused in building and using open source.

And in addition to that, I also wear multiple hats in the community as a CNCF TAG security lead, which is the technical advisory group for security for the CNCF as the name sort of suggests.

And then in addition to that in the OpenSSF, I’m a maintainer of some projects like GUAC and SLSA. And in addition to that, I’m also a TAC member and a governing board member.

CRob (01:47)
Now that we’ve got the today story for Michael told, could you maybe share with us, what’s your open source origin story?

Michael Lieberman (01:56)
Sure, so I’ve been using open source obviously, like, since college, you maybe even before that, actually, I remember learning my first programming language, was a very early version of Python. And you know, that was kind of my first introduction, I think, to open source. But as far as, like, my career is gone, using open source for a really long time, occasionally opening up an issue on whether it was prior to GitHub, you know, into some mailing list or that sort of thing.

More recently, when I was…got into the banking world, I was working at a big hedge fund called Bridgewater for a while where we were doing a lot in open source, but we were starting to become more open and contributing back, especially given that we were so security focused. We wanted to make sure that certain things we had seen would get addressed upstream.

And so that involved a lot of stuff on that end. And then as time sort of progressed, would say around the time of the pandemic started getting a lot more involved in, in open source, where I first was a regular member of the financial services end user working group, which is part of the CNCF or at least for the CNCF, I should say. And then eventually I became one of the chairs of that.

Folks in that group are very interested in security. And that’s how I got introduced to TAG Security, where I started working on the Supply Chain Integrity white paper that they had sort of best practices paper, I should say, that they wrote up and I contributed to. And then eventually the Secure Software Factory Reference Architecture, which I helped lead. But as part of this whole thing, there was a relatively new group called the OpenSSF, or Open Source Security Foundation.

And that’s kind of…how I got introduced there, because obviously CNCF, TAGv Security, security, that’s very much focused purely on cloud native, but then you had OpenSSF, which was focused more broadly just on open source security, and that’s kind of how I got introduced there.

CRob (03:54)
That’s pretty cool. And you’re unique in regards to some of our other guests in that you are leader of a startup. Can you maybe describe a little bit for the audience, what’s it like being a startup within this amazing open source ecosystem?

Michael Lieberman (04:10)
It can be very challenging to kind of get some signal above the noise, especially when you don’t have like…when I worked at the big banks, it was very easy to say, “Hey, I work at Big Bank X, you should listen to me,” compared to when you work at a startup and you’re like, “Well, I’m a founder of a startup. You should listen to me.” But I think the thing there is you sort of live and die by your contributions.

So when folks see that you are a good contributor to the community, that you are coming in with your expertise, but also trying to understand other things, and also just trying to do the chopping wood sort of work. It’s not just about, yes, I’ve worked on that for years and this is how it should be done. It should be also, hey, this is how it should be done. And let me show you, let me sit down and actually write down some of the documentation or let me work on a tool or open up a PR to show you how that sort of thing would work.

So it’s a little bit of everything and I will say it’s kind of hard to not get drowned out sometimes by just how much is going on. But with that said, I will say if you put in the time and effort, it can be very rewarding.

CRob (05:18)
But let’s talk about some of your contributions that I know you still, in addition to running your company and being involved in all these different organizations, you’re an active developer and participant in a couple of our biggest initiatives within the foundation, SLSA and GUAC. Could you maybe talk a little bit about SLSA first, and then let’s dive into dependencies with GUAC.

Michael Lieberman (05:38)
Sure. So my introduction to SLSA was kind of a funny one where I saw an article about this new set of practices that had been contributed to the OpenSSF by Google. And I immediately asked the question of like, what’s going on here? What is this thing? And everybody else said, “We just released it today. Like, give us a second!” But I got involved very early on because it seemed like, wow, this is actually hitting something that was not being hit prior, right?

A lot of other best practices that are out there were hitting like how to secure a thing, but not how do you prove that the data that says you are securing the thing is actually accurate? That’s really what SLSA is hitting, especially in the build process right now. So I got involved very, very early on. I became part of the steering committee.

And then as sort of things evolved, I became sort of an actual maintainer of the spec itself, where I contribute both to the content of the spec, as well as reviewing stuff and making sure that things line up with other pieces of the spec. So that’s kind of how I got involved with SLSA.

And then as part of some of that work, right, that was back when I was still working at the banks. And as I kind of continued on, it was very clear that when we look at software bill of materials or SBOMs and a lot of this other data like SLSA that’s like the information that’s coming out of SLSA there is not a lot to make sense of it. And what things do make sense of it often look at each of those things as a in a vacuum? So it looks at a SLSA attestation in a vacuum or an SBOM in a vacuum and so there was something that was missing there.

And after myself and my co-founders decided to create a startup, we quickly realized that maybe we should start working on a tool to start addressing stuff in that space. And a few of the other folks in the space — like Professor Santiago Torres from Purdue University, as well as some folks from Google, like Brandon Lum and Mihai, who also is a big contributor in OpenSSF — we all sort of kind of came together and we realized like, oh, we all want to build this thing.

And so why, given that we were all working together in some capacity in the open source already, we said, as opposed to all of us creating different tools and yada, yada, why don’t we all come together and build something? And so that’s kind of was the genesis of GUAC and GUAC became this tool and it’s now part of the OpenSSF. At the time, we had sort of created it outside of the OpenSSF, but once it kind of reached that critical mass, we decided to contribute it to the OpenSSF.

And for folks who are not super familiar, it’s essentially a way to analyze lots of SBOMs, lots of SLSA attestations, other supply chain metadata, enrich it with information like vulnerability data from open source databases like OSV, or to figure out license risk information from APIs like Clearly Defined, and all sorts of other stuff. And so it’s trying to help answer the questions of what is in your supply chain? What should you be worried about? Where’s the next Log4j? Where does that live? And what does it impact? Is it impacting one of my applications or all of my applications? So it’s really a graph of understanding everything that’s in your software.

CRob (09:03)
So this sounds really valuable to downstream consumers. How would like an open source maintainer or developer leverage an SBOM or GUAC? Would that be useful to them?

Michael Lieberman (09:13)
Sure, yeah. So it depends. So the way that we currently have it set up, and it’s evolving, is

GUAC right now has a good answer for when you have lots of SBOM. So for the end stream consumer, but also in addition to that, we’re having conversations, for example, with the Kubernetes ecosystem and some other ecosystems that their project actually consists of lots and lots of lots of different pieces.

And for them, one SBOM is not enough because they have hundreds potentially of sub-projects that they need to keep track of. And some of the questions they ask are, did I update this logging library in one Go project or did I update in all of them? And do I have a situation where this sub-project is using a completely different framework than this other one and that’s introducing just general risks to the project.

So that’s kind of where some maintainers are kind of coming at it from as well. But there are plans actually as of recently, we had some discussions to actually start working on some additional tools and integrating with additional tools like Protobom, like bomctl, that are also OpenSSF projects to also help answer the question of what happens when I have one or five SBOMs as opposed to when I have 500 or 5,000 SBOMs. And there’s a big gap right now between I have one and I have 5,000 and we’re looking to try and help bridge that gap with some of the upcoming work in the new year.

CRob (10:44)
Very nice. Speaking of upcoming work, you’ve been in this space for a while. What do you see coming down the road in the next few years around supply chain security or dependency management?

Michael Lieberman (10:56)
Sure. What I see is a lot more of the open source distributors, so like your Pi PI, your Maven Central’s, integrating a lot more of this stuff like SBOMs and SLSA into the ecosystem and I know a lot of them are already in the works for doing this. But I think for the downstream consumers, right, but it’s one thing to do the security, it’s another thing to have folks who are consuming the software know, yes, I feel confident that they were that they’re actually doing the right things because I’m getting signed in attested documentation that I can tie back to the maintainers and You know unless the maintainers are completely lying to me, in which case, well, now they can’t be trusted and yada, yada, there’s potentially public repercussions or whatever for those individuals, like there’s clearly incentive to do this.

And so what I see is finally folks looking at not just how to produce all of this stuff, but how to consume it to answer questions and address risk, which then I think will introduce what is really needed right now, which is a feedback loop of people are producing SBOMs, some of them are gonna be more accurate than others. But I think through analysis tools, whether it is GUAC or any other thing that’s out there, right, Like there’s OSV scanner and there’s a bunch of other, things, we’ll start to see that folks will find gaps in those SBOMs, in those SLSA statements, in the supply chain metadata and realize that it needs to be updated. That data will be updated or enriched and will be generating better SLSA and SBOMs in the future. That’s, I think, one big thing.

The second big thing I think we’ll see, which is maybe, maybe a bit more, I don’t want to sound myopic or anything like that, but I do think especially in the AI space in the next, whether it’s next year or the next couple of years, we will see something akin to a Log4j in that space where a lot of folks will be relying maybe either on a data set that everybody thought was good, but it turns out it’s been polluted in some way, poisoned in some way. Or a model itself that a lot of things rely on that has some critical vulnerability, whether it’s purposefully injected with some sort of malicious behavior, or if it’s just, hey, we realize that the way we train this led it to be potentially exploited in a particular way to get it to make certain decisions that we don’t want to allow.

I think we’ll see that in the future because it’s hard enough to track dependencies and understand your supply chain when you’re talking about software and software consists of code. But when you’re talking about AI models that are trained on terabytes or more of data here, it can be very difficult to know like, where does that needle live of this thing has somehow polluted the overall model?

CRob (14:02)
That’s really interesting food for thought. We’ll keep an eye on that as we go into the future.

But let’s move on to the rapid fire part of our talk. So I got a couple quick and easy questions. I just want the first thought that comes into your head. First question, mild or spicy food?

Michael Lieberman (14:26)
Spicy.

CRob (14:30)
Nice. I also love me some spicy food. Text editor, Vi or Emacs?

Michael Lieberman (14:38)
Vi, Vi.

CRob (14:41)
(Laughter) All right, well that’s not the most contentious question we’re going to have. But Vi, I also love me some Vi. What’s your favorite adult beverage?

Michael Lieberman (14:51)
Ooh, whiskey.

CRob (14:53)
Whiskey, very good. Very safe answer. Now the most controversial question. Tabs or spaces?

Michael Lieberman (15:01)
(Sighs) Spaces.

CRob (15:06)
Awesome. And then finally, what’s your favorite open source mascot?

Michael Lieberman (15:11)
You know, for as much as I love the goose, I will say I’m a big fan of Tag Security’s TrashPanda raccoon mascot.

CRob (15:20)
Very nice. That’s a good one. So as we close out, do you have any kind of words of advice for someone that’s getting into the cybersecurity or open source development space?

Michael Lieberman (15:32)
Sure, yeah. The advice I always give is just get involved, right? Just get started. And it doesn’t matter where you get started. And to be clear, I was the same way where I’d be scared to, you know, I’d be like, I think I found a bug in a potential piece of software. Should I bother them with this? I could be wrong. It’s like, obviously do your due diligence. Like don’t just come in and immediately start saying, hey, I found this thing.

And obviously, everybody is, everybody’s wrong and I’m right. It’s more like, well, I look through the documentation, I look to see if there was any open issues about a thing, I didn’t see it, I opened up an issue, right? And then when it comes to the open source community generally, or just cybersecurity community in general, just, I think the big thing is ask questions, introduce yourself. Folks wanna help, right? Because even if we were all like, I wanna say like, most of us are pretty nice in the community. You know, yes, we can get a little annoyed at things and yada yada, but most of us are pretty nice.

And what I say is even if we weren’t nice, it’s in our best interest to get help here because it’s…there’s so much stuff that needs to get done. And so just come in, introduce yourself and so on. There’s also like, you know, for folks who are, who think that they need lots of expensive training on a lot of this, you know, you don’t, at least especially when you’re starting.

There is a lot of free stuff out there. There’s, for example, the Linux Foundation has a ton of great free resources, like from a training perspective for cybersecurity. But in addition to that there’s also all sorts of other like, you know, charities as well. Like if you’re somebody who is from an underrepresented group or, or struggles financially that, you know, can help get you a leg up as well.

But, in addition to that, think the big thing is it just keeps going back to introduce yourself to the community because we can help point you in the right direction. There’s a lot of folks who will help mentor and help you out in whatever way you need, whether it’s pointing you in the direction of a great training course or helping mentor directly or even just pointing you to here’s a good book you should read that I think helped me out.

CRob (17:42)
That’s awesome advice. Thank you. And finally, do you have a call to action for our listeners, something you’d like to see them do?

Michael Lieberman (17:50)
Sure. First, I’ll talk a little bit more broadly and then I’ll go more specific. But I think more broadly again, especially for folks who are end users who work at end users, like, you know, your, your big banks, I know having worked at big banks for years and years and years, you can feel disincentivized to participate in the open source community. Push for this because as folks who will be listening to this will are inevitably aware, right, banks are using tons of open source.

A lot of the challenges they have is not being able to contribute back, not being able to work with the community to address issues. Push on your organizations to be more involved while highlighting the actual risks there of if we don’t get involved, this costs us more money because there’s a whole community that’s looking to help and help fix this. And so we need to need to be involved to kind of get our voices heard.

And then in addition to that, just generally, right? Like, be more involved in the open source community, be more involved in the security community, especially if you’re a security engineer, it’s much easier to be involved in open source just from like, hey, I created this really cool tool that has this new feature and this new feature could make us all lots of money. You know, security is not often seen as the thing that makes everybody a ton of money. So it can sometimes be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll work on that later. No, no. If you don’t take care of security, could potentially lose a lot of money. You could lose customer data. You could ruin your reputation, the reputation of others and cause serious damage. So more involved in the cybersecurity community is super important.

And then a bit more specific, a bit more self-serving, come join the GUAC community. We’re always looking for more contributors. We’re trying to find more end users, you know, one of our big challenges has been, turns out, you know, a lot of enterprises actually do use GUAC or have been making POCs of GUAC, but a lot of those large enterprises don’t come to the community, for example. And we’ll hear through the grapevine, such and such as using GUAC and they’re running into a bug. It’s like, well, we can’t fix it if we don’t know about it. So, so come join, come participate.

And again, as I mentioned earlier, contributions are not purely, like, I wrote, you know, a thousand lines of code for this new feature. It can just be open up an issue, fix a typo in our documentation. It can be helping write notes in the community meetings, right? Anything is helpful and appreciated.

CRob (20:19)
That’s awesome. Thank you very much, Michael. Appreciate your contributions to the community and thank you for joining us today.

Michael Lieberman (20:26)
Yep! Thank you for having me.

Announcer (20:28)
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 a lot going on with the OpenSSF and many ways to stay on top of it all.

Check out the newsletter for open source news, upcoming events and other happenings. Go to openssf.org slash newsletter to subscribe. Connect with us on LinkedIn for the most up to date OpenSSF news and insight. And be a part of the OpenSSF community at openssf.org slash get involved. Thanks for listening, and we’ll talk to you next time on “What’s in the SOSS?”

Dec 17

Love0

What’s in the SOSS? Podcast #22 – Sovereign Tech Agency’s Tara Tarakiyee and Funding Important Open Source Projects

By OpenSSF Podcast

Summary

In this episode, CRob talks to Tara Tarakiyee, FOSS technologist at the Sovereign Tech Agency, which supports the development, improvement and maintenance of open digital infrastructure. The Sovereign Tech Agency’s goal is to sustainably strengthen the open source ecosystem, focusing on security, resilience, technological diversity and the people behind the code.

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on Overcast Listen on Pocket Casts

Conversation Highlights

01:42 – Why the Sovereign Tech Fund became the Sovereign Tech Agency
03:59 – The ways the Sovereign Tech Agency supports open source infrastructure initiatives
04:42 – The four criteria for Sovereign Tech Agency funding: prevalence, relevance, vulnerability and public interest
06:51 – Sovereign Tech Agency success stories
09:09 Plans for the Sovereign Tech Agency in 2025
11:54 – Tara answers CRob’s rapid-fire questions
13:54 – Advice to those entering open source development or security field
14:55 – Tara’s call to action for listeners

Episode Links

Transcript

Tara Tarakiyee soundbite (00:01)
You can actually hear the relief when we’re talking to maintainers about how can we sort of get this kickstarted? How can we get the ball rolling? Hopefully those maintainers can also show the benefits of investing in security, investing in resilience to people that depend on their software and get them to invest in it as well.

CRob (00:17)
Hello everybody, I’m CRob. I do security stuff on the internet. I’m a community leader and I’m also the chief architect within the Open Source Security Foundation. One of the coolest things I get to do as part of this role is to host “What’s in the SOSS?” podcast, where I talk to interesting people, maintainers, leaders and folks involved with upstream open source security and open source supply chain security.

Today, we have a real treat. We have Tara from the Sovereign Tech Agency, and they are here to talk about the amazing work within the upstream community for the last several years. So maybe could you introduce yourself and explain a little bit about the organization you’re working with?

Tara Tarakiyee (01:00)
Thank you. I work with the Sovereign Tech Agency. We are a GC that’s funded by the German government, specifically through the Ministry of Economy and Climate to essentially strengthen the open source ecosystem, which is our mission. And we do that by investing in the components of our open digital infrastructure that are, I’m sure as you know, like maintained by very few people, but relied upon by millions and millions, what we call the roads and bridges of our digital world.

CRob (01:33)
I like that. That’s nice phrasing. As I mentioned, you all went through a little bit of a rebranding recently. Could you maybe talk about the change for us?

Tara Tarakiyee (01:42)
Yeah. So we had the whole concept that was developed by our co-founders, Fiona Krakenbürger and Adriana Groh to provide like an investment fund to support this critical infrastructure. And that was sort of like our first, let’s say, vehicle of support for projects. But essentially, what we’re trying to do is meet the community where they are, providing what they need. And we know that, sure, investments are good, but support for something as complex as our post-request instruction needs to come in different forms and factors.

So since then, we’ve also introduced two other programs, what was called the Bug Resilience Program, which is now called the Sovereign Tech Resilience, as part of the rebrand, and also our Sovereign Tech Fellowship. We provide services. We work with the vendors in this space who have experience with vulnerability management, with reducing technical debt, with doing code reviews and providing audits, and also with setting up and running bug bounty programs. And we provide those vulnerability management services. to open source projects indirectly. So we pay for it, but the services go to the open source project.

And with the fellowships, we are looking for maintainers who are key people in their communities who support several projects that for them, like, it wouldn’t make sense to apply it through something like the Sovereign Tech Fund. Usually what we do with the Sovereign Tech Fund is these service agreements that are sort of like deliverable based.

With the fellowship, we’re providing like a different way of providing support for maintainers through our fellowship where we support maintainers who are key in their communities by providing either with a board contract or with a six-month fellowship, three-month fellowship.

Those are sort of the sort of a bundle of services that we’re providing and under the banner of the Sovereign Tech Agency. We all have the same mission. We’re still doing the same things. It’s just the name, name change was just to reflect that there’s like a big house now where all these different programs live in.

CRob (03:47)
Makes a lot of sense. Could you maybe just share a little about how the agency kind of executes on this mission? How does someone become aware of these programs and how does someone take advantage of them to participate?

Tara Tarakiyee (03:59)
For the fellowship, we issued a call on our website. Currently, the call is closed for this year as we sort of review through the application that came in. For the Sovereign Tech Fund, we are still accepting ongoing applications on our website. So if you go to sovereign dot tech, you will find our website, and there you can navigate to the apply section where you can learn about our criteria, what we look for in critical infrastructure, open source, and from there it will take you to our application platform.

CRob (04:32)
If one of the programs is open, are there any kind of limits on who can qualify to participate? Does it have to be an EU citizen or can it be anywhere from around the world?

Tara Tarakiyee (04:42)
Anyone in the world can apply as long as you’re maintaining open source critical infrastructure. The way we, it’s hard to define something as open source critical infrastructure, you know? So for us, we take four criteria. So we look at sort of the relevance of your open source project. Is it used in different places, in many places, by many people?

We also look at…sorry, that was prevalence…then relevance, is it used in particular sectors that are particularly important? Like it could be not be used by many people, but if it’s using like the energy sector or aviation or something that’s, like, highly critical, then that’s another factor that of balances that out.

And then we look at vulnerability. So, I mean, it’s not a nice question, but like what would happen if your software component would disappear tomorrow? Would like people panic? Like that’s probably a good sign that it’s infrastructure. But also we balanced the question out also by looking at different aspects of like, why is this not receiving funding?

Because I think that’s a fundamental thing for us. Like we exist to support infrastructure because in general, like those are things that are hard to fund. It’s something, it’s a resource that everyone depends upon, but very few people contribute to. And that’s, that’s sort of like our niche. So that’s also something we look at in vulnerability.

And finally, we do an evaluation, like, is this a software that’s in the public interest? So is it being used in applications where it’s generally good for society? So, based on our evaluation of these four criteria and also look at the activities, like is it more maintenance activities or generally like you want to develop new features? Would you occasionally fund or invest in new features? But that’s only when there’s like a strong sort of public interest argument for it and no one else would fund it. In general, we mostly focus on improving the maintainability and security of those critical software components.

CRob (06:35)
Thinking back, you all have been operating, whether it’s the fund or the agency, for a little over two years. And thinking back over that, are there any particularly interesting success stories or where you felt that the fund or the agency made a real difference?

Tara Tarakiyee (06:51)
I mean, it’s generally nice just to hear the feedback from the different projects. It’s hard for me to name, like, one particular example or pick a favorite. In general, think like, when I look back and see like projects where they struggled for a long time to get the people that depend on them interested in security. Even though, like, it’s a critical dependency for, like, many companies and stuff, but nobody wants to fund like a security team.

People would rather fund new features and, which just like sort of exacerbates the problem. Like it just creates more pressure on the maintainer and creates more technical debt and more potential for things to go wrong. You can actually hear the relief when we’re talking to maintainers about, yeah, like we’re interested in your security plans. Like how can you sort of get this kickstarted? How can we get maybe those other people also interested? Cause again, like it’s such a big lift sometimes and with some software that we can’t do it all on our own.

So we try getting the ball rolling and then hopefully those maintainers can also show the benefits of investing in security, investing in resilience to the people that depend on their software and get them to invest in it as well. I’m also very proud of our investments in, for example, Fortran, where it’s a technology that’s still very important. Like people hear about it and think like, remember it like maybe from their university days or reading about it on Wikipedia, but it’s still there. It’s still lots of code written in it.

I think Fortran developers deserve the ammenities that modern day developers have, like a good package manager having the developer tooling. So I was very proud of our investment there because, again, like, also considering the state of the world right now, Fortran is very vital in climate modeling and us understanding the world around us. So it’s a very critical time for investment in such technology.

CRob (08:50)
Excellent. Yeah, the older languages deserve the same love that the newer ones do. I totally agree. Getting out your crystal ball, it’s towards the end of 2024 here. What’s in the future for the Sovereign Tech Agency in your programs for next year? Any big plans or anything you’re very excited about to get to work on next year?

Tara Tarakiyee (09:09)
So for work, we learned a lot from the past two years. So I think now it’s time for us to also start exploring ways of bringing in more people into the field of open source. I think, like, a common concern is looking at open source technology, like, there are very few maintainers and not so many are able to come in. Like there’s a high barrier for entry. So maybe I think looking at ways of opening up the field and getting more people, because I mean, the door is open, but that doesn’t mean that people automatically come in. Like, people need help to be able to get into open source.

And also we work with some very complicated projects because their infrastructure, because they’re written in sometimes like high-performance languages that are harder to get into. So I don’t want to compare, but like it’s not maybe as easy as, like, web development where sometimes the languages are a bit more accessible and there are already like a plethora of resources existing to help people get into them.

So I think just getting more people through the door, getting more, let’s say communities that don’t have access to the resources to become open source developers, helping get to the door, get them to becoming the maintainers of the future, I would say, is, would be something I would be very interested in working on or a problem to tackle.

With open source, it’s important to consider that interoperability needs standards because that’s how you create sort of like a healthy technology ecosystem. Because you don’t want like sort of a monoculture where like one software becomes a dominant thing and then that just creates lots of issues. So you want to have a variety of implementations around the standard to solve a particular problem. That just creates healthier software.

I think exploring how maintainers interact with standards bodies that exist. Also, you have increasing regulation and standardization coming from governments. And finally, I think there are some not official standard bodies, but bodies that help certain technologies communities or programming languages sort of improve their work that the maintainers know about these, but most people don’t. And I think getting more involved in sort of supporting the work that happens there to create better specifications, move technologies forward and get more maintainers involved in the conversations about the technologies that they’re developing at standard bodies will be another area of interest for us.

CRob (11:42)
Very nice. Yeah, that’s an interesting vision. A docket of things that I think we’ll probably be working on together next year. Well, let’s move on to the rapid-fire part of the interview.

(Musical sound effect: Rapid fire, rapid fire!)

All right, I have a couple quick questions. I want you to just answer right off the top of your head. Spicy or mild food?

Tara Tarakiyee: (12:06)
Spicy, but I have a limit.

(Sound effect: Ooh, that’s spicy!)

CRob (12:12)
Excellent. From your perspective, what’s your favorite open source mascot?

Tara Tarakiyee (12:17)
Oh, I mean, have to give it to Penguin, like Linux Penguin.

CRob (12:22)
Tux! Very nice!

Tara Tarakiyee (12:24)
I do sometimes get jealous of the FreeBSD devil, because it’s slightly cooler.

CRob (12:28)
Absolutely! Thinking back on your career with interacting with open source, what was your first open source project you remember using?

Tara Tarakiyee (12:37)
I mean, the first one I actively used knowing it was open source was Firefox. I wa a big part of the Firefox community early on in university. So I think how I got my start into open source advocacy was by organizing. I think, back then we were throwing these Firefox launch parties in Jordan. And from there, I got into Linux.

CRob (13:02)
That’s awesome. Well, thank you for sharing. As we wind down, do you have any advice that you would want to share to either someone entering the open source development or security field or is currently a maintainer?

Tara Tarakiyee (13:15)
I think it’s important for people to start listening more to maintainers. From my experience, like for the past two years working with maintainers, they know what they want, know where the problems are. There are people who really care about all these critical pieces of infrastructure that we depend upon, and they do have a good sense of what the problems are.

It’s just that I think not that many people listen to them that someone who really cares about software development in a way that’s… I compare it a bit to being an artisan where it’s more about the craft of the software and you just want to create the best software ever and sometimes occasionally they create things that are very important and used in many places. Sometimes not accidentally, sometimes intentionally as well and then, yeah, when it gets to that scale.

I think my advice is also don’t be afraid to say you need help. I think many maintainers feel like they need to do it on their own or think that people don’t care about their issues, but there are people out there who care about giving the adequate support to maintainers and creating communities of care for them. Definitely don’t be afraid. My advice for maintainers is don’t be afraid to ask for help and people do care about the work that you do. And my advice for others is please listen to maintainers. They know what they’re doing.

CRob (14:42)
Excellent. That’s excellent advice. Thank you. And finally, do you have a call to action, whether it’s kind of personal, like you just mentioned about for maintainers or contributors, or kind of around the Sovereign Tech Agency?

Tara Tarakiyee (14:55)
We do see the significant need or the significant under supply of what level of resources we need to put into our digital infrastructure. And there’s a huge gap between how many resources we’re putting in right now compared to what’s actually needed to create like a healthy, vibrant system.

Like, we’re still far off at the moment that, and I don’t think that many people realize that. So my call to action would be, let’s take this problem more seriously. Let’s invest like real resources, solving, like, the very real problems. We can’t wait til the next Log4j to happen and then say, oh my God, this could have been avoided.

I’m sort of also…maybe because like I’ve been working, doing this work for like 15 years now, tired of like that cyclical nature of like something big happens, people start caring. And then two years later, things revert back. Yeah, let’s, let’s try to break that cycle a little and put, like, significant investment that’s more long-term into creating maintainable, like sustainable support systems for our open source infrastructure.

CRob (16:00)
Excellent. Thank you. I appreciate you coming in to share your wisdom and your experiences through the Sovereign Tech Agency. I wish you a great day.

Announcer (16:09)
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 a lot going on with the OpenSSF and many ways to stay on top of it all. Check out the newsletter for open source news, upcoming events and other happenings. Go to openssf.org slash newsletter to subscribe. Connect with us on LinkedIn for the most up-to-date OpenSSF news and insight and be a part of the OpenSSF community at openssf.org slash get involved. Thanks for listening, and we’ll talk to you next time on What’s in the SOSS?

Summary

Conversation Highlights

Episode Links

Transcript

Summary

Conversation Highlights

Episode Links

Transcript

Summary

Conversation Highlights

Episode Links

Transcript

Summary

Conversation Highlights

Episode Links

Transcript

Summary

Conversation Highlights

Episode Links

Transcript

Summary

Conversation Highlights

Episode Links

Transcript

Summary

Conversation Highlights

Episode Links

Transcript

Summary

Conversation Highlights

Episode Links

Transcript

Summary

Conversation Highlights

Episode Links

Transcript

Summary

Conversation Highlights

Episode Links

Transcript

We envision a future where OSS is universally trusted, secure, and reliable. Join us in making open source more secure.

Subscribe to the OpenSSF Newsletter!

Get the latest announcements, event info, and the community news in your inbox