Foundation celebrates five additional members, new cyber reasoning sandbox project, and release of v1.0.0 Python Secure Coding Guide to support open source security globally
MINNEAPOLIS – OpenSSF Community Day North America – May 21, 2026 – The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), a cross-industry initiative of the Linux Foundation focused on sustainably securing open source software, today announced five new members have joined the foundation. The OpenSSF also notes additional technical resources for Python secure coding, the first cohort of OpenSSF Ambassadors, and new projects like OSS-CRS joining the foundation’s sandbox during OpenSSF Community Day North America in Minneapolis. OpenSSF’s efforts ensure that open source remains a trusted foundation for digital innovation by addressing the technical, legal, and human elements of modern cybersecurity.
These milestones address two main converging pressures in the software ecosystem: increasingly mandatory security standards and the need to unify organizations and countries behind those standards. By providing practical resources, the OpenSSF helps projects navigate complex requirements such as the CRA. The project continues to expand its global community as well, keeping all that benefit from open source software ahead of sophisticated risks and threats.Â
“As the threat landscape for software supply chains becomes more complex, the need for community driven security standards has never been more urgent,” said Steve Fernandez, General Manager of OpenSSF. “The growth we’re seeing in our membership and the arrival of projects like OSS-CRS show that security is an important priority for all. The OpenSSF is providing the practical tools and guidance developers need to build more resilient software.”
New OpenSSF members include ActiveState, Aikido, Minimus, and TuxCare, who join the Foundation as General Members. The FreeBSD Foundation also joins as an Associate Member. These organizations will contribute to working groups and technical initiatives to help drive the strategic direction of the OpenSSF. By collaborating within a neutral forum, these members support the long term sustainability of the open source ecosystem.
Foundation Updates and Milestones
In the second quarter of 2026, the OpenSSF achieved several milestones to secure and support more resilient software for all:Â
Supporting Quotes
 “The Linux Foundation and OpenSSF are where the serious work on open source security gets done. No single organization secures the software supply chain alone. Thirty years of building secure open source infrastructure is what we bring to that work, and that work is better done together.”Â
– Abby Kearns, CEO, ActiveState Â
“Open source software is the foundation of modern software development, and supporting that ecosystem has always been core to Aikido’s mission. Through projects like Safe Chain, Zen Firewall, OpenGrep, and BetterLeaks, we’re investing in practical, community-driven security tooling that helps developers build and ship software with speed, trust and confidence. We believe securing open source is a shared responsibility, and we’re proud to contribute technologies that make the broader ecosystem safer and more resilient for everyone.”
– Willem Delbare, Founder and CEO, Aikido Security
“As a critical component of the global digital infrastructure, we believe FreeBSD must be part of the security discussions shaping the future of open source. Joining the OpenSSF will enable us to collaborate with others to help protect the software the world depends on.”Â
– Deb Goodkin, Executive Director, FreeBSD Foundation
“Minimus is proud to join OpenSSF and work alongside its other members to help secure the open source ecosystem that allows us all to thrive. Enabling developers to build on open source components while keeping security teams happy is central to our business, and we intimately understand the responsibility we all share in achieving that goal.”
– Kat Cosgrove, Head of Developer Advocacy, Minimus
“TuxCare is pleased to be joining OpenSSF and the cross-industry effort to strengthen open-source security. For more than a decade, we’ve worked to keep open source secure and reliable in enterprise production over the long term. We see that kind of sustained reliability as essential to the trusted, secure open-source ecosystem OpenSSF envisions.”
– Igor Seletskiy, CEO, TuxCare
Events and Gatherings
OpenSSF members are gathering this week in Minneapolis at OpenSSF Community Day North America. To get involved with the OpenSSF community, join us at the following upcoming events: OpenSSF Community Day Europe (Prague; October 6) and Open Source Summit Europe (Prague; October 7-9).
Additional Resources
About the OpenSSF
The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) is a cross-industry organization at the Linux Foundation that brings together the industry’s most important open source security initiatives and the individuals and companies that support them. The OpenSSF is committed to collaboration and working both upstream and with existing communities to advance open source security for all. For more information, please visit us at openssf.org.Â
About the Linux FoundationÂ
The Linux Foundation is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure, including Linux, Kubernetes, LF Decentralized Trust, Node.js, ONAP, OpenChain, OpenSSF, PyTorch, RISC-V, SPDX, Zephyr, and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.Â
The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Media Contact
Grace Lucier
The Linux Foundation
pr@linuxfoundation.orgÂ
In this inaugural episode of Big Thoughts, Open Sources, host CRob sits down with Brian Fox, Co-founder and CTO of Sonatype, to discuss the friction between rapid AI adoption and foundational software security. Brian shares insights from the 11th annual State of the Software Supply Chain Report, revealing the emergence of “slop squatting” and the high frequency of AI models recommending non-existent or vulnerable dependencies. The conversation explores how the Model Context Protocol (MCP) could revolutionize developer compliance and why the industry must fund the critical infrastructure supporting our trillion-dollar open source ecosystem.
00:23 – Welcome: Big Thoughts, Open Sources inaugural episode.
01:01 – Brian Fox’s journey: Apache Maven, Sonatype, and OpenSSF.
02:53 – The critical role of Maven Central in the software supply chain.
03:26 – Decades of security trends: The persistent “Log4Shell” pattern.
05:34 – The “Tribal Knowledge” problem for AI agents.
07:06 – State of the Software Supply Chain Report: AI recommending made-up code versions.
08:09 – Explaining “Slop Squatting” and AI hallucinations.
10:03 – Model Context Protocol (MCP): Turning security tools into AI expert systems.
13:42 – Do not ignore 60 years of software engineering “physics”.
15:11 – The “Vulcan Mind Meld”: Injecting governance data into AI agents.
17:19 – Risks, rewards, and the need for ML SecOps discipline.
19:30 – “Inefficient code is still inefficient code”: Lessons from cloud migrations.
21:01 – Building an “AI-native SDLC” with upfront security.
24:18 – The sustainability crisis: Secure open source builds are not free.
27:17 – Conclusion: Funding open source infrastructure (8 trillion dollars of value).
Crob (00:23)
Welcome, welcome, welcome to Big Thoughts, Open Sources, the OpenSSF’s new podcast. We’re gonna dive a little more deeply in with some of the amazing community members, subject matter experts, and thought leaders within open source, cybersecurity, and high technology. Today in our inaugural episode, I’m very pleased to welcome a friend of the show, Brian Fox from Sonotype. How you doing, Brian?
Brian Fox (00:47)
I’m doing well, how are you?
Crob (00:48)
Excellent, we’re super glad to have you today. So maybe just for our audience members that are unfamiliar with your work, could you maybe talk a little bit about how you got into open source and kind of what you specialize in in this amazing ecosystem?
Brian Fox (01:01)
How I got an open source, that’s a long conversation. geez, all the way back in 2002, 2003, I suppose, is when I really, really got involved. I had done some dabbling and some other things before that, but I got involved around that time in Apache Maven. I started writing some plugins.
They’re pretty popular plugins, people still use them these days. And those ultimately got pulled into the Apache project, the official project. I kind stowawayed and came in as a committer. A few years later, I joined up with some other folks that were also working on Maven and we co-founded Sonatype. It’s been 19 years now.
CRob (1:45)
Wow, that’s awesome.
Brian Fox (1:46)
Yeah, and so then I was ultimately the…the chair of the Apache Maven project for a long time. still an Apache member of the foundation. And then more recently, even though it’s been a while, what, four or five years now, we joined the OpenSSF. I’ve been on the Governing Board with you for a while. I’m also on the Governing Board of FINOS, which is the financial open source.
And for the last couple years, also been on the Singapore Monetary Authority’s Cyber
Experts Group. Yeah, that’s fun And so, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time focused on those things. One of the things that Sonatype does for the community we run Maven Central, right? Which for people that don’t know that’s where all the world’s open source Java components come from.
CRob
Yeah, it’s kind of sounds like a big job It is a big job running critical infrastructure for all that kind of stuff And so, you know over the years that’s given us really interesting insights into what’s going on with the supply chain so, you know, that’s kind of that’s sort of what led us to the path that brought me to OpenSSF and all those other things.
CRob (2:53)
Yeah, you and your team have been amazing participants and contributors to our community and just kind of even putting aside all the work with Maven. Just your kind of participation in our working groups and our efforts has been amazing. Yeah, thank you. So today I think you wanted to talk about a topic a lot of people probably haven’t heard about. This little thing called AI. I have a hard time spelling that.
Brian Fox (3:16)
Right?
CRob (3:20)
Let’s just set the stage. What are you thinking about? What do we want to have a conversation around AI about?
Brian Fox (3:26)
Yeah, I think so if we back up a little bit, right? So it was probably around 2011, 2012, I suppose. We started looking at some of the trends that we were seeing within the Maven central downloads. We were seeing things like the most popular version of a crypto library was the one that had a level 10 vulnerability.
fixed and patched years before, but that everybody was still using the vulnerable version. The log for J, log for shell pattern has existed basically forever. It’s not actually new. And so that led us down the path to start doing different things to help our customers A, understand what open source they were using. Way back then, nobody knew. They were like, we’re not using open source. What they really meant was, I don’t think I’m using Linux in open office. They didn’t understand.
that their developers were pulling in all these components. And so the problem space back then was helping them have visibility and then providing data and controls to help them better govern their choices. So we’ve always been trying to help expedite and make it more efficient for developers to make better choices. And so it’s interesting to see this development of AI and all of the kind of things that have come along with it. So that got me thinking, you know, what?
When we started out to build some of the stuff that we built for our customers, my focus at that time was to make it possible to do the analysis in real time so that it wasn’t the case that, we’re just going to do all our stuff and then we’re going to run a compliance scan at the end of the week or end of the month or something. So we were very focused on, it needs to be able to be run every single bill all the time. We need to be able to provide guidelines so that they don’t have to ask the legal team and wait six weeks for an answer, or the security team, right?
We were trying to capture those roles, or those rules, into the system so that they could make better choices in real time. And that was a big thing that organizations needed to be able to scale and become efficient. When you start dealing with thousands of developers, tens of thousands or millions of applications, the tribal knowledge problem kind of falls apart.
CRob (5:33)
Absolutely.
Brian (5:34)
Right? And so you start thinking about what happens with AI, and if you don’t have that stuff in an automated, you know, coded kind of way, how do you feed that to an agent? The agent’s not hanging out with you at lunch. It doesn’t get an onboarding session where we say things like, you know what, we never use an LGPL dependency because we ship our code. Or, you know, we only fix vulnerabilities five and above. Or, you know, whatever the policy may be, those things sometimes can be shared among developers.
CRob (6:02)
Right. and it plays into kind of the classic problem with engineering – is most engineers I’ve met don’t like doing documentation. And with AI entering the chat room becoming this accelerant, it’s making decisions based off of knowledge or lack thereof. if you don’t have your security policy documented, it even goes back to thinking about the early days of Kubernetes.
Where it was a big mental shift for people to have that software defined network inside. And that helped, I think, a lot of organizations get better discipline and rigor where you had less mysterious outages. Because the firewall guy in the back end said, I didn’t do anything, but try test it again.
Brian Fox (6:46)
Right, right. Yeah, for sure. And that’s kind of what we’re seeing now. We’re seeing a lot of that with the, not just with agents. mean, agents are sort of like the next big step and not everybody’s
fully there yet. Some people are dabbling with it. But even just AI assisted coding, you’re seeing the same problem that you come in and you say, hey, I want a new feature. And it just grabs whatever statistically likely thing dependency is going to be in there. We’ve done some studies. We recently released the state of the software supply chain report. It’s a great report. Yeah, thank you. This was our 11th year. We just published it last month. And we did a deep dive on AI recommendations, you know, and we found that 30 % of the time the models were recommending made up versions.
CRob (7:35)
What?
Brian Fox (7:36)
Yeah, just making them up. You know, so it’s kind of shocking. In the real world, you know, if you’ve got a tool, that’s one of those things that fails fast, right? Like it picks a version that doesn’t exist, the thing goes and it immediately blows up and then, you know, Claude or whatever you’re using will go, whoops, and it’ll fix it. So it’s kind of funny, burns some tokens, but the downsides aren’t huge.
If the agent randomly picks a terrible dependency or a very old one that does in fact exist, I would argue that’s worse because there’s no fail fast in that scenario.
CRob (8:09)
Well, you also have the whole problem with slop squatting. Where the models seem to, regardless of what vendor provider you’re getting it from, they seem to fairly consistently suggest the wrong dependencies, kind of like typo squatting.
And so now the bad guys have recognized this kind of fairly consistent behavior and they’re uploading malicious packages with those bad names so that you don’t break the build because it can find what needs.
Brian Fox (8:33)
So instead of it failing fast, it fails fast by grabbing a back door or something. Exactly, that’s exactly right. That’s what slop squatting is what they call it now. Yeah, and so those are some of the challenges that we observe and you kind of take it to the extreme where now you potentially have less sophisticated developers, not classically trained developers using these tools, and they don’t know what they don’t know.
They wouldn’t necessarily stop to say, hey, I want you to now be a security expert and do an assessment of the code you just created. Like somebody who knows better will do that. But if you’ve not lived through the pain that you and I have lived, you wouldn’t think about that. And so on average, these things are going to potentially toss away a lot of the learnings that we’ve known for so many years.
CRob (09:21)
And that’s been a chronic challenge, trying to get the tribal knowledge instantiated, trying to help people make those right decisions. And the AI tools are amazing productivity and efficiency savers, but they are bringing in, as you said, classically untrained professionals that they are not a software engineer. They don’t understand how a system should be architected, or they don’t understand kind of the app sec best practices that help secure the foundation of everything and not let the world fall apart.
Brian Fox (9:59)
The interesting thing is I think they can be if prompted correctly.
CRob (10:02)
Yes.
Brian Fox (10:03)
Right? And that’s where some of the knowledge gap comes in. And I think, what was it last summer, Anthropic released the MCP model control protocol, right? Which is, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that pretty deeply and looking at all the tools. And I wrote about this. I think that there’s a high likelihood that we see a lot of the tools we use in software, in the SDLC today, moving more towards providing their capabilities as subject matter experts in “a thing” to an AI agent via MCP.
So I think that, for me, is pretty exciting for a number of reasons. It means, as a tool vendor, I don’t have to create a plug-in for IntelliJ and one for Eclipse and one for VS Code. As an example, MCP can be the same thing for I don’t care what tool you’re using, because it’s interacting with me via this standard API. And I’m kind of talking to it in more or less English prompts. So my ability to deliver the value that we have into whatever tool you feel like using today, and they change every week, is pretty cool.
And I would also argue that the ability to insert that information and to potentially roll out the root prompting that all of the developers are using in these capabilities is better. You’re going to get potentially better compliance than you do today. One of the things I struggled with forever was we created an IDE plugin for our capabilities that it demoed amazingly well. It showed, hey, this dependency has vulnerabilities, or license, or would make recommendations. It was great. But developers just didn’t want to install more plugins. They just weren’t using it, right?
So while it demoed well, the actual usage of it was very low for compliance reasons. That’s a thing we struggle with. Every tool vendor struggles with that. But if you were able to insert that same information into an MCP capability and the company rolls out a root prompt that says something like, hey, every time you’re choosing a new project or a new dependency or trying to assess a dependency, use this MCP server to get up-to-date real-time information, it’s more or less going to do that every time. Right.
CRob (12:13)
Yeah, and I think back to like when I was a baby cyber person going studying for my CISSP, there was a lot of talk in the exam materials about expert systems, which is exactly what I think a best case scenario with these tools can be. It’s you’re expert. I don’t have to necessarily have this expertise. That’s right. But thinking about it takes a lot of knowledge to craft these expert systems. Let’s talk about how some of these models have been trained on potentially less than expert data.
Brian Fox (12:43)
Right, and that’s just, think, the inevitable nature that the frontier models have been trained on, you know, all the stuff that they can find.
CRob (12:49)
The internet.
Brian Fox (12:49)
On the internet, good information, bad information, people talking about terrible dependencies a lot might statistically make that more of recommendation, right? And I think that can be okay as long as you’re plugging in the models that have real data. The things that we’ve seen, you know, when we assess the models is that like I said, they make up versions, they pick old versions arbitrarily, they don’t know about anything newer than when they were last trained, which means both new versions and also vulnerabilities that might be an older version.
So they’re inadvertently recommending, and it’s not even a recommendation really, it’s just using it, right? It’s putting it in there and writing the code around it. Imagine picking Spring, right? It’s just going to go, I’m going to write a Spring app and I’m going to use all Spring 5.
And then when you probe it, then it’s like, oh, sorry, I have to do two major framework updates. You almost have to throw it away and start over. And so if you’re able to plug the right data in up front, you don’t have all of that waste. And again, if you have people who don’t know to prompt it to ask about the latest versions, you can insert that underneath the hood. I think that’s what’s really cool.
Brian Fox (13:59)
But what we’re seeing currently, I kind of wrote about this a little bit too, that I feel like we’re throwing out all the lessons of the past. We’re talking about situations where whole tools, SAST is under fire right now, right? Because when all the code can be just completely generated, what’s the problem with SAST? But I do think that we’ve learned a lot of things over the years if we can figure out how to plug those capabilities into what’s being generated.
I think we can bring all of that forward with us. But the entire SDLC is going to have to adapt to that. It’s not going to be sufficient to say, I’ve got a bunch of developers over here. They’re doing AI assisted development. And then later, we’re going to run a bunch of SAS and produce legacy reports. That’s not going to work. The information has to be fed directly into the AI capabilities up front.
CRob (14:51)
And it’s the classic problem we’ve always had, where security historically is the the last thing done, addressed, it’s bolted on at the end in a lot of cases. And just this AI tooling and just the velocity it has is a huge accelerant for the sins of our past we’ve never actually addressed.
Brian Fox (15:11)
Absolutely, but it also provides the Vulcan mind meld if you want to think of it. You now have that opportunity to plug that right into what the agent is thinking about in the moment. You can’t do that with the humans, but you can do that with the agent. And that’s what I think is potentially exciting about this.
Where I described it recently at a summit, we’re sort of in a bootstrap situation, though, right? Like, we don’t have all of those capabilities. Organizations haven’t rolled them all out. And so we’re sort of in this weird situation, one foot on the boat, one foot on the dock, and it’s not going to end well as we’re going through it. And worse, there are people that are afraid of the MCP protocol. So I hear lots of organizations say, we just block it completely.
Yeah. It’s a little hard to argue that that’s not a reasonable place to start because of the nature of what’s happening. We saw just the other day the latest version of Shai-Hulud came out. Did you see this? And they used MCP capabilities as data exfiltration. And I’m like, come on, guys. There’s so much power in this, but now you’re making it like a bad thing. So I think the industry and the tools and all of that are going to have to work through governance of the MCP capabilities, sanitization inspection of the MCP capabilities just like we’ve seen. So it’s sort of one of these things like when you’ve been around long enough you can recognize the patterns. It’s new and exciting but also the pattern rhymes with a bunch of stuff we’ve done before and what frustrates me is that like everybody charges ahead so fast they just feel like it’s all new it’s all different it’s like yes but let’s not forget everything we’ve learned over the last 60 years of software engineering because the physics is still the same.
CRob (16:50)
Well, and that’s where so our AI / ML working group wrote a paper around ML SecOps. And the paper was really interesting. I recommend the audience check it out. But it was they talked about classic techniques that are assisted and are helpful with AI development. And then it talked about some gaps where we have things like are not documented policies that are kind of a hindrance and something that’s an opportunity in the future to try to get addressed.
Brian Fox (17:18)
Yeah.
CRob (17:19)
But…I’m of two minds about my friends, our new robot overlords, in that it can be extremely helpful, but I don’t see a lot of people reconsidering those lessons of the past of software engineering. To say this is all brand new and totally different, like, well, you’ve got different GPU accelerators and dedicated cores to do things.
And now with this like agentic and ADA architecture where things are more highly distributed, yeah, that’s new twists, but it’s not brand new. We’ve done networking. We’ve done composite applications for decades.
Brian Fox (18:01)
Right. It’s the same thing, you know, we saw when, you know, we were like, oh, everything should be serverless or let’s go to the micro architecture, micro architecture, micro service architecture is going to solve everything until it doesn’t. Right.
Or, you know, that’s no problem, we’ll just put it in the cloud because I can just infinitely scale my machines, right? So I see the same pattern all again, that we sort of say, yes, but this time is different because insert new technology, and then we realize, yes, but everything we know is still true. And that’s what I think we’re sort of grappling with right now as we go through this. What is absolutely true is that, you know, the AI capabilities, the agents, all these things are making everything happen so much faster. That can be good.
can also be bad. If you’ve forgotten all the lessons of the past, you’re just going to create a ton of crap much faster than you could before. And by the time you realize it, it might be too late.
CRob (18:57)
I’m familiar with a lot of enterprises that were going through a digital transformation journey, trying to update their heritage software to newer things and to the cloud to get that scalability and cost efficiency. But a lot of organizations didn’t take that journey, didn’t learn from lessons from the past.
they just crammed what they had out in the cloud, and then a month later they get this giant bill and they’re shocked and confused, or they didn’t understand that this thing wasn’t architected for zero trust, and they’re leaking data everywhere.
Brian Fox (19:30)
Right, right. Or that, or just even the performance reasons why you were excited to infinitely scale, sure, but somebody’s not excited to infinitely pay a bigger bill. Inefficient code is still inefficient code, right? And that’s what I think we’re gonna see with… with AI capabilities is just going to happen faster. And without humans in the loop, it provides less opportunities for us to course correct, which is why I’ve been taking a step back and thinking about how do we do that? How does it make sense? I think for some of the stuff that we’ve been doing as a business, it’s really exciting because we have built up really interesting, unique data sets based on being able to see everything going on with Maven Central. We’ve long had Nexus, the repository manager that’s out there.
We have hundreds of thousands of instances. Those things are proxying for enterprises, not just Maven, but NPM, Nougat, Python, all the things. And so that gives us visibility into other ecosystems so we can understand what’s going on, what’s commonly used in enterprises, these kinds of things. And so all of that data can be fed now directly, like I said, the Vulcan mind meld directly into these tools. And it makes it a lot easier.
So in some ways, when we sort this out, and people become less afraid of MCP capabilities, we can directly inject a stream of high quality data to make all of those things better. But, before businesses can really leverage that, they have to get out of the experimentation phase. They have to roll that out. And these things are kind of interrelated. What we see is that organizations are afraid to let developers just go with AI assisted development because it’s not governed, because they can’t govern it.
And those are echoes of what I saw firsthand during the early days of open source. Like I said in the beginning, people said, we’re not using it. And then I’d tell them, yes, you are. And then their reaction was like, well, just shut it all out. It’s like, right, you can’t do anything. So the reaction that some enterprises have right now of like, we’re just not going to do anything with AI, is just setting themselves up to be left behind.
The right answer is to do it thoughtfully and use tools to help them make better decisions.
CRob (21:43)
So reflecting back, mentioned in your report that you have some guidance for people around AI. What would the top two or three things, if somebody’s thinking about moving more aggressively in this AI direction, what can they take away and do immediately or start thinking about?
Brian Fox (21:01)
Yeah, I mean, think the biggest thing is humans like to…try to take the old patterns and just adopt it to the new new technologies like we were talking about take an inefficient architecture and throw it in a cloud It’s gonna fix everything. No, it’s not and I think that’s true of Let’s call it the AI SDLC right an AI native SDLC Might resemble a normal SDLC, but it should be designed differently, right?
You know trying to do the checks and balances after the fact is even worse than it was with humans You need to think about providing that information upfront so that you get the value in the creation of the code and not try to chase it out. You need to be able to think about how all of these things can be done in parallel with agents, breaking these things down. what I would say is, don’t just try to do what you’re doing today and use AI to do it. Take a step back and really assess how can you adopt this.
It’s sort of like the conversations we were having in the board today about developers, maintainers are getting overwhelmed with AI slop. It’s true. A reaction is to stop allowing that to be contributed, just dismiss everything AI. That’s not a good answer. A better answer is let’s figure out how to help them use AI tools to be able to keep up with that, right? Because that’s what it’s good for. It can review and assess the patches faster than the maintainers and then provide sort of a first pass filter, if you will, right?
But that requires thinking outside of the box. Don’t just try to keep doing what you’re doing and try to keep up with it. Think about how you judo move that into something that makes more sense for your organization.
CRob (23:42)
And this skirts along another kind of project you’re passionate about, sustainability and funding. It is one thing to try to admonish the developers, why aren’t you using AI? But there are real costs involved around this. And, just to say, well, you should use the tool that doesn’t help them when there’s no funding. They don’t have access to infrastructure to be able to do these things. And that’s like, think, it touches on your passion project around trying to help get the package repositories more sustainably funded.
Brian Fox (24:18)
That’s right. Yeah, I mean, if you take a step back and you think about open source when probably you started, certainly when I started, what that really meant was you were donating your time. And you were sharing your thoughts, and you were sharing your words via code. And that was in a time when it was perfectly acceptable. In fact, it was the only choice that you built things and you shipped them off of your laptop.
There was when the Apple MacBook Air launched, the first one. That launched with a version of Maven on it that was signed by my key, my personal key, that was built on my personal laptop. So everybody that bought the launch version of the MacBook Air had my signed code on it. That’s kind of cool.
But also kind of scary, right, when you think about it. Like, what if my laptop was compromised? And that’s the world we live in today. Fortunately, in 2009 or whatever it was, that was a little bit more remote of a chance. And so everybody thinks like, well, that’s crazy. You wouldn’t do that anymore. So what does it mean today? It means you have to have certified builds. Usually that means it’s running in the cloud, and it’s attested to, and all these kinds of things. And that’s not free.
Like I can’t donate that, I’m not a hyperscaler. Most open source gets that infrastructure donated by these big companies, but there’s a lot of opportunity for abuse, right? And these types of things. it’s just, at the end of the day, it’s not free. So the cost of producing open source is not free anymore. It’s not just donating my time with equipment and internet access I already have, right? That’s the big difference. And I think people don’t really recognize that and now fast forward to what we’re just talking about AI the obvious answer to deal with AI, you know Piled on PRS is to have AI assistance help.
Who’s gonna pay for that? It’s literally not free. It costs electricity, last time I checked we still pay for our electricity Regardless
CRob (26:12)
Electricity, water…
Brian Fox (26:14)
Right all of these things, right? These are very…they have very real implications. They’re just not free and so There’s no good answer to that. How does that get aligned? How do we…how do we continue to create open source software that can power all of these industries in a world where it’s not just somebody donating their time and thoughts? There are no good answers. But we’re working towards trying to align that. Because the bulk of open source software, certainly in our world, in these areas, is being consumed by organizations that are selling for-profit software, more or less.
There’s definitely a lot of hobbyists and stuff like that the biggest consumers from our repositories are all the giant companies. I’ve named the top 100. You would know every single one of them. And I’m sure that’s true for all the registries. So there has to be an answer in there. I don’t know the stat off the top of my head, but the Linux Foundation does the census, right? And it’s billions of dollars of economic value that open source creates. Eight billion? Nine billion?
CRob (27:16)
Trillion.
Brian Fox (27:17)
Oh, it’s a trillion now?
CRob (27:17)
It’s eight (8) trillion, I believe.
Brian Fox ()
Eight (8) Trillion dollars worth of economic value being produced by open source…1 % of that would pay for a lot of that infrastructure, and then a whole bunch more. And so I think that’s what ultimately we have to figure out how to balance. AI just makes that worse, because it moves the bar even further.
CRob (27:39)
Interesting conversation. Any final thoughts you want our listeners and viewers to take away?
Brian Fox (27:46)
Well, certainly go take a look at The State of the Software Supply Chain Report.
CRob (27:51)
Great report.
Brian Fox (27:52))
sonatype.com/SSCR Certainly, I’ve also written a number of blogs. You can find those at our website as well. That deep dive, kind of all these topics we touched on here. Yeah.
CRob (28:02)
Excellent. We’ll put some links as we do our summary. So Brian, thank you for our inaugural episode of Big thoughts, Open Sources. I think this was an amazing conversation that we’re gonna continue to be adding onto and reconsidering in the coming weeks and months.
Brian Fox (28:20)
Yeah, thanks for having me kick it off in Napa.
CRob (28:25)
Thank you. Well, I hope everybody stays cyber safe and sound. We’ll talk to you soon.
By Jeff Diecks
Artificial intelligence is changing how we approach software security. Open source is at the center of that shift.
Over the past year, DARPA’s Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) showed that cyber reasoning systems (CRS) can go beyond finding vulnerabilities. These systems can analyze code, confirm issues, and generate patches. This brings us closer to a future where security is more automated and scalable.
When the competition ended, one question remained. How do we take these breakthroughs and make them usable in the real world?
Today, we are taking an important step forward.
The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) is welcoming OSS-CRS as a new open source project under the AI / ML Security Working Group.
OSS-CRS emerged from AIxCC and is a standard orchestration framework for building and running LLM-based autonomous bug-finding and bug-fixing systems.
The open framework is designed to make CRS practical outside of the AIxCC environment. During the competition, teams built powerful systems that were released as open source. However, many of them depended on the competition infrastructure, which made them difficult to reuse or extend. OSS-CRS addresses that gap.
OSS-CRS Features include:
Read the OSS-CRS research paper: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.08566
The move of OSS-CRS into OpenSSF marks a clear transition from research and competition to open collaboration and long term development.
OpenSSF provides a neutral home where projects like OSS-CRS can grow. Contributors can work together to improve the tools, validate results, and support adoption across the ecosystem.
OSS-CRS is already producing real results. Using OSS-CRS, Team Atlanta discovered twenty-five vulnerabilities across sixteen projects spanning a broad range of software including PHP, U-Boot, memcached, and Apache Ignite 3.
OpenSSF will continue to support this important work by providing human connectors between CRS tools and open source communities. The goal is to help triage and validate vulnerability reports and proposed patches before they reach maintainers, ensuring findings are accurate, actionable, and respectful of maintainers’ time.
Recent research from the OSS-CRS team validates the necessity of having a human in the loop. The team manually reviewed a set of 630 AI-generated patches and found 20-40% of the patches to be semantically incorrect. The incorrect patches pass all automated validation but are actually wrong — a dangerous failure mode only catchable by manual review.
A key benefit of the OSS-CRS project is its Ensemble feature. The Ensemble feature enhances accuracy and reliability by combining patches from multiple CRS approaches and using a selection process to pick the one most likely to be correct. The research showed this approach consistently matches or outperforms the best single component in improving semantic correctness, which is hard to eliminate at the single-agent level. This collaboration of systems helps produce more robust results for open source defenders.
With projects like OSS-CRS, OpenSSF will continue to support AI-driven security work to help turn innovation into practical outcomes for open source.
We offer several options to get involved including:
Jeff Diecks is a Senior Technical Program Manager at The Linux Foundation. He has more than two decades of experience in technology and communications with a diverse background in operations, project management and executive leadership. A participant in open source since 1999, he’s delivered digital products and applications for universities, sports leagues, state governments, global media companies and non-profits.
Cross-post originally published on the Kusari Blog
Open source software powers the modern world; securing it remains a shared responsibility.
The software supply chain is becoming more complex and more exposed with every release. Modern applications rely on vast ecosystems of open source components, dependencies, and increasingly AI-generated code. While this accelerates innovation, it also expands the attack surface dramatically. Threat actors are taking advantage of this complexity with more frequent and sophisticated attacks, from dependency confusion and malicious package injections to license risks that consistently target open source communities.
At the same time, developers are asked to move faster while ensuring security and compliance across thousands of components. Traditional security reviews often happen too late in the development lifecycle, creating friction between development and security teams and leaving maintainers overwhelmed by reactive work.
Kusari is proud to partner with the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) to offer Kusari Inspector at no cost to OpenSSF projects. Together, we’re helping maintainers and security teams gain deeper visibility into their software supply chains and better understand the relationships between first-party code, third-party dependencies, and transitive components. Â
Projects adopting Kusari Inspector include Gemara, GitTUF, GUAC, in-toto/Witness, OpenVEX, Protobom and Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA). As AI coding tools become standard in open source development, Kusari Inspector serves as the safety net maintainers didn’t know they needed.Â
“I used Claude to submit a pull request to go-witness,” said John Kjell, a maintainer of in-toto/Witness. “Kusari Inspector found an issue that Claude didn’t catch. When I asked Claude to fix what Kusari Inspector flagged, it did.”
Maintainers are under growing pressure. According to Kusari’s Application Security in Practice report, organizations continue to struggle with noise, fragmented tooling, and limited visibility into what’s actually running in production. The same challenges affect open source projects — often with fewer resources.
Kusari Inspector helps OpenSSF projects:
Kusari Inspector – Secure Contributions at the Pull Request
Kusari Inspector also helps strengthen the relationship between developers and security teams. Our Application Security in Practice research found that two-thirds of teams spend up to 20 hours per week responding to supply chain incidents — time diverted from building and innovating.Â
For open source projects, the burden is often even heavier. From our experience in co-creating and maintaining GUAC, we know most projects are maintained by small teams of part-time contributors and already overextended maintainers who don’t have dedicated security staff. Every reactive investigation, dependency review, or license question pulls limited capacity away from priorities and community support — making proactive, workflow-integrated security even more critical.
By increasing automated checks directly in pull requests, projects reduce review latency and catch issues earlier, shifting from reactive firefighting to proactive prevention. Instead of maintainers “owning” reviews in isolation, Kusari Inspector brings them integrated, context-aware feedback — closer to development and accelerating secure delivery.
This partnership gives OpenSSF projects the clarity they need to make informed security decisions without disrupting developer workflows.
“The OpenSSF welcomes Kusari Inspector as a clear demonstration of community support. This helps our projects shift from reactive security measures to proactive, integrated prevention at scale,” said Steve Fernandez, General Manager, OpenSSF.
“Kusari’s journey has always been deeply connected to the open source security community. We’ve focused on closing knowledge gaps through better metadata, relationships, and insight,” said Tim Miller, Kusari Co-Founder and CEO. “Collaborating with OpenSSF reflects exactly why Kusari was founded: to turn transparency into actionable trust.”
If you’re an OpenSSF project maintainer or contributor interested in strengthening your supply chain posture, use Kusari Inspector for free — https://us.kusari.cloud/signup.
Author Bio
Michael Lieberman is co-founder and CTO of Kusari where he helps build transparency and security in the software supply chain. Michael is an active member of the open source community, co-creating the GUAC and FRSCA projects and co-leading the CNCF’s Secure Software Factory Reference Architecture whitepaper. He is an elected member of the OpenSSF Governing Board and Technical Advisory Council along with CNCF TAG Security Lead and an SLSA steering committee member.
Foundation welcomes Helvethink, Spectro Cloud, Quantrexion as members, offers Kusari Inspector for free to projects, and celebrates increased investment in AI securityÂ
AMSTERDAM – Open Source SecurityCon Europe – March 23, 2026 – The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), a cross-industry initiative of the Linux Foundation that focuses on sustainably securing open source software (OSS), today announced new members and key project momentum during Open Source SecurityCon Europe.Â
New OpenSSF members include Helvethink, Spectro Cloud, and Quantrexion, who join the Foundation as General Members. As members, these companies will engage with working groups, contribute to technical initiatives, and help guide the strategic direction of the OpenSSF. Together, members support open, transparent, and community-driven security innovation, and the long-term sustainability of the Foundation.
“Open source security continues to evolve significantly in the face of new, automated threats,” said Steve Fernandez, General Manager of OpenSSF. “Our member organizations are seeding a more secure future, built with longevity in mind, by working with the OpenSSF. This network of projects, maintainers, and thousands of contributors is key to reinforcing reliable, sustainable open source software for all.”
Foundation Updates and Milestones
In the past quarter, OpenSSF has furthered its mission to secure open source software with the following achievements:
OpenSSF growth follows the announcement of $12.5 million in grant funding awarded to OpenSSF and Alpha-Omega from leading AI providers. Funding from these leaders underscores broad industry support for more sustainable AI security assistance that empowers maintainers. Learn more about how OpenSSF and Alpha-Omega are using this grant to build long-term, sustainable security solutions, here.Â
Supporting Quotes
“At Helvethink, we work at the intersection of cloud architecture, platform engineering, and DevSecOps. Open source components are foundational to modern infrastructure from Kubernetes and IaC tooling to CI/CD pipelines and security automation. Strengthening this ecosystem requires measurable standards, robust software supply chain security practices, and active collaboration across the community. By joining OpenSSF, we are actively participating in several working groups to contribute to initiatives focused on supply chain integrity, secure-by-design principles, and the continuous improvement of cloud-native security practices.”
– José Goncalves, co-founder, Helvethink
“Quantrexion is proud to join OpenSSF and support its mission to strengthen the security, resilience, and trustworthiness of open source software. As a company focused on governance and human risk management, we see secure open ecosystems as a critical part of long-term digital resilience.”
– Dionysis Karamitopoulos, CEO, Quantrexion
“Open source is the foundation of modern infrastructure — and its security is a shared responsibility. By joining the OpenSSF, Spectro Cloud is investing directly in the community work that raises the bar for everyone. Just as importantly, it strengthens the standards and practices behind the software we ship, so our customers can deploy Kubernetes with confidence in the integrity of every component. We’re proud to support the OpenSSF mission and to keep translating that momentum into real product capabilities that make secure software a default, not a bolt-on.”
– Saad Malik, CTO and co-founder, Spectro Cloud
Events and Gatherings
OpenSSF members are gathering this week in Amsterdam at Open Source SecurityCon Europe. To get involved with the OpenSSF community, join us at the following upcoming events:
Additional Resources
About the OpenSSF
The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) is a cross-industry organization at the Linux Foundation that brings together the industry’s most important open source security initiatives and the individuals and companies that support them. The OpenSSF is committed to collaboration and working both upstream and with existing communities to advance open source security for all. For more information, please visit us at openssf.org.Â
Media Contact
Grace Lucier
The Linux Foundation
Securing the open source software that underlies our digital infrastructure is a persistent and complex challenge that continues to evolve. The Linux Foundation announced a $12.5 million collective investment to be managed by Alpha-Omega and The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). This funding comes from key partners including Anthropic, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Google DeepMind, GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI. The goal is to strengthen the security, resilience, and long-term sustainability of the open source ecosystem worldwide.
This new investment provides critical support for OpenSSF’s proven, maintainer-centric initiatives. Targeted financial support is a key catalyst for sustained improvement in open source security. The results of the OpenSSF’s collective work in 2025 are clear:
The security landscape is changing fast. Artificial intelligence (AI) accelerates both software development and the discovery of vulnerabilities, which creates new demands on maintainers and security teams. However, OpenSSF recognizes that grant funding alone is not the sole solution to the problems AI tools are causing today on open source security teams. This moment also offers powerful new opportunities to improve how security work is completed.
This new funding will help the OpenSSF provide the active resources and dedicated projects needed to support overworked maintainers with the triage and processing of the increased AI-generated security reports they are currently receiving. Our response will feature global strategies tailored to the needs of maintainers and their communities.
“Open source software now underpins the majority of modern software systems, which means the security of that ecosystem affects nearly every organization and user worldwide,” said Christopher Robinson, CTO and Chief Security Architect at OpenSSF. “Investments like this allow the community to focus on what matters most: empowering maintainers, strengthening security practices across projects, and raising the overall security bar for the global software supply chain.”
The true measure of success will be execution. Success is not about how much AI we introduce into open source. It is determined by whether maintainers can use it to reduce risk, remediate serious vulnerabilities faster, and strengthen the software supply chain long term. We are grateful to our funding partners for their commitment to this work, and we look forward to continuing it alongside the maintainers and communities that power the world’s digital systems.
“Our commitment remains focused: to sustainably secure the entire lifecycle of open source software,” said Steve Fernandez, General Manager of OpenSSF. “By directly empowering the maintainers, we have an extraordinary opportunity to ensure that those at the front lines of software security have the tools and standards to take preventative measures to stay ahead of issues and build a more resilient ecosystem for everyone.”
To learn more about open source security initiatives at the Linux Foundation, please visit openssf.org and alpha-omega.dev.
🇳🇱 Open Source SecurityCon Europe → Agenda live and registration open
🎙️ Securing Agentic AI in Practice → March 17 Tech Talk on AI/ML security in action
📖 Compiler Annotations Guide → Practical C/C++ hardening without rewrites
🏆 Security Slam 2026 → 30-day challenge to level up project security
🇪🇺 CRA in Practice @ FOSDEM → Turning regulation into actionable steps
📦 Package Repository Security Forum → Cross-ecosystem collaboration in action
🎙️ What’s in the SOSS? → CFP tips and a 4-part AIxCC deep dive
6 min read
Planning to attend KubeCon + Cloud Native Con Europe in March? Don’t miss OpenSSF’s co-located 1-day event! This gathering will bring together a diverse community, including software developers, security engineers, public sector experts, CISOs, CIOs, and tech pioneers, to explore challenges and opportunities in modern security. Collaborate with peers and discover the essential tools, knowledge, and strategies needed to ensure a safer, more secure future.
The agenda is live! Read the blog to learn what not to miss in Amsterdam and to see highlights from SecurityCon North America.
Read the blog | Register now | View the agenda
Join us for the first OpenSSF Tech Talk of the year, focusing on agentic artificial intelligence (AI) security.
In this session, we will explore how the OpenSSF AI/ML Security Working Group is developing open guidance and frameworks to help secure AI and machine learning systems, and how that work translates into real-world practice. Using SAFE MCP and other solutions from OpenSSF member companies as examples, we will highlight community-driven efforts to improve the security of agentic AI systems, the problems they address, the design tradeoffs involved, and the lessons learned so far.
We will also feature OpenSSF’s free course, Secure AI/ML Driven Software Development (LFEL1012), which gives attendees a clear path to build practical skills and contribute to this rapidly evolving field.
Register and mark your calendar for March 17 at 1:00 p.m. ET. Additional speaker information will be shared soon.
OpenSSF has released a new Compiler Annotations Guide for C and C++ to help developers improve memory safety, diagnostics, and overall software security by using compiler-supported annotations. The guide explains how annotations in GCC and Clang/LLVM can make code intent explicit, strengthen static analysis, reduce false positives, and enable more effective compile-time and run-time protections. As memory-safety issues continue to drive a significant share of vulnerabilities in C and C++ systems, the guide offers practical, real-world guidance for applying low-friction hardening techniques that improve security without requiring large-scale rewrites of existing codebases.Â
Security Slam 2026 is a 30-day security hygiene challenge running from February 20 to March 20, culminating in an awards ceremony at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe. Hosted by OpenSSF in partnership with CNCF TAG Security & Compliance and Sonatype, the event encourages projects to use practical security tools, including OpenSSF resources, to strengthen their security posture based on their maturity level. Participants can earn recognition, badges, and plaques for completing milestones, reinforcing a community-driven effort to improve open source software security at scale.Â
Read the blog to learn more | Register now to receive reminders and instructions
At FOSDEM 2026, the CRA in Practice DevRoom brought together open source and industry leaders to turn the EU Cyber Resilience Act from policy discussion into practical action. Through case studies and panels, speakers shared concrete approaches to vulnerability management, SBOMs, VEX, risk assessment, and the steward role.Â
On February 2, OpenSSF convened the Package Manager Security Forum, bringing together maintainers and registry operators from major ecosystems to address shared challenges in package repository security. Discussions highlighted common concerns around identity and account security, governance and abuse handling, transparency, and long-term sustainability. The session reinforced that package ecosystem risks are interconnected and that improving security requires cross-ecosystem coordination, shared frameworks, and continued collaboration through OpenSSF’s neutral convening role.
Is your open source project meeting the “minimum definition” of security? The OpenSSF has officially integrated the Open Source Project Security Baseline (OSPS Baseline) into its Best Practices Badge Program.
In our latest blog, David A. Wheeler explains how you can quickly identify and meet essential security requirements to earn a Baseline Badge.
#50 – S3E2 Demystifying the CFP Process with KubeCon North America Keynote Speakers
Stacey Potter and Adolfo “Puerco” GarcĂa Veytia share practical, behind-the-scenes advice on submitting conference talks, fresh off their KubeCon keynote. They break down how CFP review committees work, what makes an abstract stand out, common mistakes to avoid, and why authenticity matters more than polish. The episode also tackles imposter syndrome and encourages new and diverse voices to shape the future of open source through speaking.
#51 – S3E3 AIxCC Part 1: From Skepticism to Success with Andrew Carney
Andrew Carney from DARPA explains the vision and results behind the two-year AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), which tasked teams with building AI systems that can automatically find and patch vulnerabilities in open source software. Despite early skepticism, competitors identified more than 80% of seeded vulnerabilities and generated effective patches at surprisingly low compute costs. The episode looks at what comes next as these cyber reasoning systems move from competition to real-world adoption.
#52 – S3E4 AIxCC Part 2: How Team Atlanta Won by Blending Traditional Security and LLMs
Professor Taesoo Kim of Georgia Tech describes how Team Atlanta combined fuzzing, symbolic execution, and large language models to win AIxCC. Initially skeptical of AI, the team shifted its strategy mid-competition and discovered that hybrid approaches produced the strongest results. The conversation also covers commercialization efforts, integration with OSS-Fuzz, and how the experience reshaped academic security research.
#53 – S3E5 AIxCC Part 3: Trail of Bits’ Hybrid Approach with Buttercup
Michael Brown of Trail of Bits discusses Buttercup, the second-place AIxCC system that pairs large language models with conventional software analysis tools. The team focused on using AI for well-scoped tasks like patch generation while relying on fuzzers for proof-of-vulnerability. Now fully open source and able to run on a laptop, Buttercup is actively maintained and positioned for broader enterprise and community use.
#54 – S3E6 AIxCC Part 4: Cyber Reasoning Systems in the Real World
CRob and Jeff Diecks wrap up the AIxCC series by exploring how competition teams are applying their systems to real open source projects such as the Linux kernel and CUPS. They introduce the OSS-CRS initiative, which aims to standardize and combine components from multiple cyber reasoning systems, and share lessons learned about responsibly reporting AI-generated findings. The episode highlights how collaboration through OpenSSF’s AI/ML Security Working Group and Cyber Reasoning Systems SIG is shaping the next phase of AI-driven security.
Connect with the OpenSSF Community at these key events:
Ways to Participate:
There are a number of ways for individuals and organizations to participate in OpenSSF. Learn more here.
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Regards,
The OpenSSF Team