🎉 2025 OpenSSF Annual Report is now live! Download Report

Tag

SLSA

Dec 17
Love0
December Newsletter - OpenSSF

OpenSSF Newsletter – December 2025

By Newsletter

Welcome to the December 2025 edition of the OpenSSF Newsletter! Here’s a roundup of the latest developments, key events, and upcoming opportunities in the Open Source Security community.

TL;DR:

🎁 2025 OpenSSF Annual Report

🎁 Free OpenSSF and Linux Foundation Education Courses

☃️ Recap: OpenSSF Community Day Korea 2025

☃️ KubeCon Keynote Recap

☃️ OpenSSF at OSPOlogyLive Europe

☃️ New podcast episodes (#46–47): AI, open source & collaboration (Jay White, Microsoft) and supply chain security in academia (Justin Cappos, NYU)

❄️ Alpha-Omega strengthened SBOM tooling and FreeBSD security

❄️ Gemara site launched

❄️ SecurityCon NA session videos now online

❄️ SLSA v1.2 adds a new Source Track

❄️ OpenBao v2.4.4 released

❄️ Upcoming events: FOSDEM (31 Jan & 1 Feb 2026), Open Source SecurityCon (23 March 2026), KubeCon+CloudNativeCon Europe (23-26, March 2026)

2025 OpenSSF Annual Report

2025 OpenSSF Annual Report

Discover how the open source security community moved forward in 2025. The OpenSSF Annual Report highlights major achievements in education, tooling, vulnerability management, research, and global collaboration with insights from leadership and working groups. It’s a powerful look at how far we’ve come and where we’re headed as we work together to strengthen the security of open source software.

Download the 2025 OpenSSF Annual Report and explore the progress, impact, and vision shaping the future of open source security.

Blogs: What’s New in the OpenSSF Community?

From Beginner to Builder: Free OpenSSF and Linux Foundation Education Courses

From Beginner to Builder: Free OpenSSF and Linux Foundation Education Courses

Level up your open source security skills with this practical roundup from Ejiro Oghenekome and Sal Kimmich, CSM, a curated list of free, self-paced Linux Foundation Education and OpenSSF courses built for developers who want to contribute with confidence. From secure coding and threat modeling to OpenSSF Scorecard automation, SBOMs/signatures, and even essential context like ethics, inclusion, and new regulations, this blog post maps out clear learning paths you can start right away, before (or alongside) your next contribution. Read the blog.

Recap: OpenSSF Community Day Korea 2025

Recap: OpenSSF Community Day Korea 2025

OpenSSF Community Day Korea 2025, held on November 4 in Seoul, brought developers and security engineers together for practical sessions on open source and software supply chain security. Talks spanned CI/CD hardening, SBOM-driven tooling, Linux kernel testing, post-quantum cryptography, and AI/ML security, all framed by OpenSSF’s pillars of Education, Policy, Projects, and Community. The event marked a strong start for a growing OpenSSF community in Korea, with public, private, and academic stakeholders aligning around the message that securing open source is shared work. Read the recap blog.

KubeCon Keynote Recap: “Supply Chain Reaction” and Why the OSPS Baseline Matters More Than Ever

KubeCon Keynote Recap: “Supply Chain Reaction” and Why the OSPS Baseline Matters More Than Ever

How can a Kubernetes cluster with zero known vulnerabilities still be compromised?

In their KubeCon keynote “Supply Chain Reaction: A Cautionary Tale in K8s Security,” Stacey Potter (Community Manager, OpenSSF) and Adolfo García Veytia (Founder and Engineer, Carabiner Systems) walked through a realistic incident where a compromised compiler image injected a crypto-mining payload long before workloads reached the cluster, bypassing traditional defenses. They showed how tools like SLSA, Sigstore, Kyverno, and Ampel help secure the entire software lifecycle, and why the new Open Source Project Security (OSPS) Baseline with its eight control families and three maturity levels gives projects a practical, stepwise framework to resist invisible supply-chain attacks. 

The talk makes a clear case: adopting the OSPS Baseline is now essential for any open source project that wants real, preventative supply-chain security. Learn more.

OpenSSF Projects in Less Than 5 Minutes

Short on time but curious about open source security tools? This video series features quick interviews with OpenSSF maintainers, giving you a fast, developer-focused look at the projects, standards, and initiatives they’re building. Hear directly from the people behind the code and discover which tools you might want to try next. Watch the videos here.

OpenSSF at OSPOlogyLive Europe

Madalin Neag, EU Policy Advisor, OpenSSF giving a talk at OSPOlogyLive Europe

Madalin Neag, EU Policy Advisor at OpenSSF participated in OSPOlogyLive Europe, where he presented The Cybersecurity Skills Framework presentation and discussed why securing software requires investing in people and shared security knowledge, not just technology. The session highlighted OpenSSF’s leadership in building practical, role-based security capabilities across engineering teams. The framework provides a clear, actionable map for identifying security skill gaps and prioritizing capability development across the software ecosystem. It also demonstrated how organizations can use a common language for security skills to systematically improve their cybersecurity posture.”

What’s in the SOSS? An OpenSSF Podcast:

#47 – S2E24 Teaching the Next Generation: Software Supply Chain Security in Academia with Justin Cappos

On the latest episode of What’s in the SOSS, host Yesenia Yser sits down with Justin Cappos, professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, to discuss why software supply chain security is still missing from many university curricula and how hands on, open source first education can better prepare students for real world security work.

The conversation explores gaps in traditional computer science education, the importance of teaching open source collaboration, and how initiatives like the Linux Foundation’s Academic Computing Accreditation Program are helping institutions modernize security education.

🎧 Listen to the episode and learn more about the Academic Computing Accreditation Program: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/academic-computing-accreditation

#46 – S2E23 Securing the Future: AI, Open Source, and Collaboration with Jay White (Microsoft)

In this episode of What’s in the SOSS? Jay White from Microsoft’s Azure office of the CTO joins to talk about his path into open source and how it led him to focus on AI, machine learning, and security. He explains how model signing and transparency are becoming core to trustworthy AI, and shares ongoing work in OpenSSF and the Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI) to build standards for AI supply chain security. The conversation touches on the challenges of cultural representation in AI models, why collaboration across companies and communities is essential, and how practitioners can get involved. Jay also reflects on the importance of community building and continuous learning as AI and open source evolve together.

News from OpenSSF Community Meetings and Projects:

In the News:

  • Dark Reading published expert commentary from Christopher Robinson after speaking to him about OpenSSF’s work categorizing 150,000 malicious npm packages. CRob notes the importance of MFA and artifact signing to verify that code is secure here: “Infamous Shai-hulud Worm Resurfaces From the Depths.”
  • In a Forbes article about the value of inclusive and resilient financial systems, Christopher Robinson of OpenSSF and Michael Lieberman of Kusari are included for their thoughts on secure fintech systems. Both suggest that open source software can play an important role in the future of finance, down to the code, and the Open Software Security Baseline is referenced in the article, “Secure By Design: Financial Systems For Climate Resilience.”
  • This month VMblog published Christopher Robinson’s cybersecurity predictions for 2026. CRob points out the importance of MLSecOps, SBOMs, and more in the article, “Five cybersecurity predictions for 2026.” 

Meet OpenSSF at These Upcoming Events!

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.

You’re invited to…

See You Next Month! 

We want to get you the information you most want to see in your inbox. Missed our previous newsletters? Read here!

Have ideas or suggestions for next month’s newsletter about the OpenSSF? Let us know at marketing@openssf.org, and see you next month! 

Regards,

The OpenSSF Team

Aug 06
Love0

OpenSSF at DEF CON 33: AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), MLSecOps, and Securing Critical Infrastructure

By Blog

By Jeff Diecks

The OpenSSF team will be attending DEF CON 33, where the winners of the AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) will be announced. We will also host a panel discussion at the AIxCC village to introduce the concept of MLSecOps.

AIxCC, led by DARPA and ARPA-H, is a two-year competition focused on developing AI-enabled software to automatically identify and patch vulnerabilities in source code, particularly in open source software underpinning critical infrastructure.

OpenSSF is supporting AIxCC as a challenge advisor, guiding the competition to ensure its solutions benefit the open source community. We are actively working with DARPA and ARPA-H to open source the winning systems, infrastructure, and data from the competition, and are designing a program to facilitate their successful adoption and use by open source projects. At least four of the competitors’ Cyber Resilience Systems will be open sourced on Friday, August 8 at DEF CON. The remaining CRSs will also be open sourced soon after the event.

Join Our Panel: Applying DevSecOps Lessons to MLSecOps

We will be hosting a panel talk at the AIxCC Village, “Applying DevSecOps Lessons to MLSecOps.” This presentation will delve into the evolving landscape of security with the advent of AI/ML applications.

The panelists for this discussion will be:

  • Christopher “CRob” Robinson – Chief Security Architect, OpenSSF
  • Sarah Evans – Security Applied Research Program Lead, Dell Technologies
  • Eoin Wickens – Director of Threat Intelligence, HiddenLayer

Just as DevSecOps integrated security practices into the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to address critical software security gaps, Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) now needs to transition into MLSecOps. MLSecOps emphasizes integrating security practices throughout the ML development lifecycle, establishing security as a shared responsibility among ML developers, security practitioners, and operations teams. When thinking about securing MLOps using lessons learned from DevSecOps, the conversation includes open source tools from OpenSSF and other initiatives, such as Supply-Chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) and Sigstore, that can be extended to MLSecOps. This talk will explore some of those tools, as well as talk about potential tooling gaps the community can partner to close. Embracing this methodology enables early identification and mitigation of security risks, facilitating the development of secure and trustworthy ML models.  Embracing MLSecOps methodology enables early identification and mitigation of security risks, facilitating the development of secure and trustworthy ML models.

We invite you to join us on Saturday, August 9, from 10:30-11:15 a.m. at the AIxCC Village Stage to learn more about how the lessons from DevSecOps can be applied to the unique challenges of securing AI/ML systems and to understand the importance of adopting an MLSecOps approach for a more secure future in open source software.

About the Author

JeffJeff Diecks is the Technical Program Manager for the AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) at the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). A participant in open source since 1999, he’s delivered digital products and applications for dozens of universities, six professional sports leagues, state governments, global media companies, non-profits, and corporate clients.

Aug 01
Love0

🎉 Celebrating Five Years of OpenSSF: A Journey Through Open Source Security

By Blog

August 2025 marks five years since the official formation of the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). Born out of a critical need to secure the software supply chains and open source ecosystems powering global technology infrastructure, OpenSSF quickly emerged as a community-driven leader in open source security.

“OpenSSF was founded to unify and strengthen global efforts around securing open source software. In five years, we’ve built a collaborative foundation that reaches across industries, governments, and ecosystems. Together, we’re building a world where open source is not only powerful—but trusted.” — Steve Fernandez, General Manager, OpenSSF

🌱 Beginnings: Answering the Call

OpenSSF was launched on August 3, 2020, consolidating earlier initiatives into a unified, cross-industry effort to protect open source projects. The urgency was clear—high-profile vulnerabilities such as Heartbleed served as stark reminders that collective action was essential to safeguard the digital infrastructure everyone depends on.

“From day one, OpenSSF has been about action—empowering the community to build and adopt real-world security solutions. Five years in, we’ve moved from ideas to impact. The work isn’t done, but the momentum is real, and the future is wide open.” — Christopher “CRob” Robinson, Chief Architect, OpenSSF

🚀 Milestones & Major Initiatives

Over the past five years, OpenSSF has spearheaded critical initiatives that shaped the landscape of open source security:

2021 – Secure Software Development Fundamentals:
Launching free educational courses on edX, OpenSSF equipped developers globally with foundational security practices.

“When we launched our first free training course in secure software development, we had one goal: make security knowledge available to every software developer. Today, that same mission powers all of OpenSSF—equipping developers, maintainers, and communities with the tools they need to make open source software more secure for everyone.” — David A. Wheeler, Director, Open Source Supply Chain Security, Linux Foundation

2021 – Sigstore: Open Source Signing for Everyone:
Sigstore was launched to make cryptographic signing accessible to all open source developers, providing a free and automated way to verify the integrity and provenance of software artifacts and metadata.

“Being part of the OpenSSF has been crucial for the Sigstore project. It has allowed us to not only foster community growth, neutral governance, and engagement with the broader OSS ecosystem, but also given us the ability to coordinate with a myriad of in-house initiatives — like the securing software repos working group — to further our mission of software signing for everybody. As Sigstore continues to grow and become a core technology for software supply chain security, we believe that the OpenSSF is a great place to provide a stable, reliable, and mature service for the public benefit.”
— Santiago Torres-Arias, Assistant Professor at Purdue University and Sigstore TSC Chair Member 

2021-2022 – Security with OpenSSF Scorecard & Criticality Score:
Innovative tools were introduced to automate and simplify assessing open source project security risks.

“The OpenSSF has been instrumental in transforming how the industry approaches open source security, particularly through initiatives like the Security Scorecard and Sigstore, which have improved software supply chain security for millions of developers. As we look ahead, AWS is committed to supporting OpenSSF’s mission of making open source software more secure by default, and we’re excited to help developers all over the world drive security innovation in their applications.” — Mark Ryland, Director, Amazon Security at AWS

2022 – Launch of Alpha-Omega:

Alpha-Omega (AO), an associated project of the OpenSSF launched in February 2022, is funded by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Citi. Its mission is to enhance the security of critical open source software by enabling sustainable improvements and ensuring vulnerabilities are identified and resolved quickly. Since its inception, the Alpha-Omega Fund has invested $14 million in open source security, supporting a range of projects including LLVM, Java, PHP, Jenkins, Airflow, OpenSSL, AI libraries, Homebrew, FreeBSD, Node.js, jQuery, RubyGems, and the Linux Kernel. It has also provided funding to key foundations and ecosystems such as the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), Eclipse Foundation, OpenJS Foundation, Python Foundation, and Rust Foundation.

2023 – SLSA v1.0 (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts):
Setting clear and actionable standards for build integrity and provenance, SLSA was a turning point for software supply chain security and became essential in reducing vulnerabilities.
At the same time, community-driven tools like GUAC (Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition) built on SLSA’s principles, unlocking deep visibility into software metadata, making it more usable, actionable and connecting the dots across provenance, SBOMs and in-toto security attestations.

“Projects like GUAC demonstrate how open source innovation can make software security both scalable and practical. Kusari is proud to have played a role in these milestones, helping to strengthen the resiliency of the open source software ecosystem.”

— Michael Lieberman, CTO and Co-founder at Kusari and Governing Board member

2024 – Principles for Package Repository Security:

Offering a voluntary, community-driven security maturity model to strengthen the resilience of software ecosystems.

“Developers around the world rely daily on package repositories for secure distribution of open source software. It’s critical that we listen to the maintainers of these systems and provide support in a way that works for them. We were happy to work with these maintainers to develop the Principles for Package Repository Security, to help them put together security roadmaps and provide a reference in funding requests.” — Zach Steindler, co-chair of Securing Software Repositories Working Group, Principal Engineer, GitHub

2025

OSPS Baseline:
This initiative brought tiered security requirements into the AI space, quickly adopted by groundbreaking projects such as GUAC, OpenTelemetry, and bomctl.

“The Open Source Project Security Baseline was born from real use cases, with projects needing robust standardized guidance around how to best secure their development processes. OpenSSF has not only been the best topical location for contributors from around the world to gather — the foundation has gone above and beyond by providing project support to extend the content, promote the concept, and elevate Baseline from a simple control catalog into a robust community and ecosystem.” — Eddie Knight, OSPO Lead, Sonatype

AI/ML Security Working Group: 

The MLSecOps White Paper from the AI/ML Security Working Group marks a major step in securing machine learning pipelines and guiding the future of trustworthy AI.

“The AI/ML working group tackles problems at the confluence of security and AI. While the AI world is moving at a breakneck pace, the security problems that we are tackling in the traditional software world are also relevant. Given that AI can increase the impact of a security vulnerability, we need to handle them with determination. The working group has worked on securing LLM generating code, model signing and a new white paper for MLSecOps, among many other interesting things.” — Mihai Maruseac, co-chair of AI/ML Security Working Group, Staff Software Engineer, Google

🌐 Growing Community & Policy Impact

OpenSSF’s role rapidly expanded beyond tooling, becoming influential in global policy dialogues, including advising the White House on software security and contributing to critical policy conversations such as the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).

OpenSSF also continues to invest in community-building and education initiatives. This year, the Foundation launched its inaugural Summer Mentorship Program, welcoming its first cohort of mentees working directly with technical project leads to gain hands-on experience in open source security.

The Foundation also supported the publication of the Compiler Options Hardening Guide for C and C++, originally contributed by Ericsson, to help developers and toolchains apply secure-by-default compilation practices—especially critical in memory-unsafe languages.

In addition, OpenSSF has contributed to improving vulnerability disclosure practices across the ecosystem, offering guidance and tools that support maintainers in navigating CVEs, responsible disclosure, and downstream communication.

“The OpenSSF is uniquely positioned to advise on considerations, technical elements, and community impact public policy decisions have not only on open source, but also on the complex reality of implementing cybersecurity to a diverse and global technical sector. In the past 5 years, OpenSSF has been building a community of well-informed open source security experts that can advise regulations but also challenge and adapt security frameworks, law, and regulation to support open source projects in raising their security posture through transparency and open collaboration; hallmarks of open source culture.” — Emily Fox, Portfolio Security Architect, Red Hat

✨ Voices from Our Community: Reflections & Hopes

Key community members, from long-standing contributors to new voices, have shaped OpenSSF’s journey:

OG Voices:

“Microsoft joined OpenSSF as a founding member, committed to advancing secure open source development. Over the past five years, OpenSSF has driven industry collaboration on security through initiatives like Alpha-Omega, SLSA, Scorecard, Secure Software Development training, and global policy efforts such as the Cyber Resilience Act. Together, we’ve improved memory safety, supply chain integrity, and secure-by-design practices, demonstrating that collaboration is key to security. We look forward to many more security advancements as we continue our partnership.” — Mark Russinovich, CTO, Deputy CISO, and Technical Fellow, Microsoft Azure

OpenSSF Leadership Perspective: 

“OpenSSF’s strength comes from the people behind it—builders, advocates, and champions from around the world working toward a safer open source future. This milestone isn’t just a celebration of what we’ve accomplished, but of the community we’ve built together.” — Adrianne Marcum, Chief of Staff, OpenSSF

Community Perspectives:

“After 5 years of hard work, the OpenSSF stands as a global force for securing the critical open-source that we all use. Here’s to five years of uniting communities, hardening the software supply chain, and driving a safer digital future.” Tracy Ragan, CEO, DeployHub

“I found OpenSSF through my own curiosity, not by invitation, and I stayed because of the warmth, support, and shared mission I discovered. From contributing to the BEAR Working Group to receiving real backing for opportunities, the community consistently shows up for its members. It’s more than a project; it’s a space where people are supported, valued, and empowered to grow.” Ijeoma Onwuka, Independent Contributor

🔮 Looking Forward

As we celebrate our fifth anniversary, OpenSSF is preparing for a future increasingly influenced by AI-driven tools and global collaboration. Community members across the globe envision greater adoption of secure AI practices, expanded policy influence, and deeper, inclusive international partnerships.

“As we celebrate OpenSSF’s 5th Anniversary, I’m energized by how our vision has grown into a thriving global movement of developers, maintainers, security researchers, and organizations all united by our shared mission. Looking ahead we’re hoping to cultivate our community’s knowledge and empower growth through stronger collaboration and more inclusive pathways for contributors.” – Stacey Potter, Community Manager, OpenSSF

📣 Join the Celebration

We invite you to share your memories, contribute your voice, and become part of the next chapter in securing open source software.

Here’s to many more years ahead! 🎉

Jun 18
Love0

Member Spotlight: Datadog – Powering Open Source Security with Tools, Standards, and Community Leadership

By Blog

Datadog, a leading cloud-scale observability and security platform, joined the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) as a Premier Member in July, 2024. With both executive leadership and deep technical involvement, Datadog has rapidly become a force in advancing secure open source practices across the industry.

Key Contributions

GuardDog: Open Source Threat Detection

In early 2025, Datadog launched GuardDog, a Python-based open source tool that scans package ecosystems like npm, PyPI, and Go for signs of malicious behavior. GuardDog is backed by a publicly available threat dataset, giving developers and organizations real-time visibility into emerging supply chain risks.

This contribution directly supports OpenSSF’s mission to provide practical tools that harden open source ecosystems against common attack vectors—while promoting transparency and shared defense.

Datadog actively supports the open source security ecosystem through its engineering efforts, tooling contributions, and participation in the OpenSSF community:

  • SBOM Generation and Runtime Insights
    Datadog enhances the usability and value of Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) through tools and educational content. Their blog, Enhance SBOMs with runtime security context, outlines how they combine SBOM data with runtime intelligence to identify real-world risks and vulnerabilities more effectively.
  • Open Source Tools Supporting SBOM Adoption
    Datadog maintains the SBOM Generator, an open source tool based on CycloneDX, which scans codebases to produce high-quality SBOMs. They also released the datadog-sca-github-action, a GitHub Action that automates SBOM generation and integrates results into the Datadog platform for improved visibility.
  • Sigstore and Software Signing
    As part of the OpenSSF ecosystem, Datadog supports efforts like Sigstore to bring cryptographic signing and verification to the software supply chain. These efforts align with Datadog’s broader commitment to improving software provenance and integrity, especially as part of secure build and deployment practices.
  • OpenSSF Membership
    As a Premier Member of OpenSSF, Datadog collaborates with industry leaders to advance best practices, contribute to strategic initiatives, and help shape the future of secure open source software.

These collaborations demonstrate Datadog’s investment in long-term, community-driven approaches to open source security.

What’s Next

Datadog takes the stage at OpenSSF Community Day North America on Thursday, June 26, 2025, in Denver, CO, co-located with Open Source Summit North America.

They’ll be presenting alongside Intel Labs in the session:

Talk Title: Harnessing In-toto Attestations for Security and Compliance With Next-gen Policies
Time: 3:10–3:30 PM MDT
Location: Bluebird Ballroom 3A
Speakers:

  • Trishank Karthik Kuppusamy, Staff Engineer, Datadog
  • Marcela Melara, Research Scientist, Intel Labs

This session dives into the evolution of the in-toto Attestation Framework, spotlighting new policy standards that make it easier for consumers and auditors to derive meaningful insights from authenticated metadata—such as SBOMs and SLSA Build Provenance. Attendees will see how the latest policy framework bridges gaps in compatibility and usability with a flexible, real-world-ready approach to securing complex software supply chains.

Register now and connect with Datadog, Intel Labs, and fellow open source security leaders in Denver.

Why It Matters

By contributing to secure development frameworks, creating open source tooling, and educating the broader community, Datadog exemplifies what it means to be an OpenSSF Premier Member. Their work is hands-on, standards-driven, and deeply collaborative—helping make open source safer for everyone.

Learn More

Feb 06
Love0

Securing Public Sector Supply Chains is a Team Sport

By Blog, Global Cyber Policy, Guest Blog

By Daniel Moch, Lockheed Martin

Everyone—from private companies to governments—is aware (or is quickly becoming aware) that the security of their software supply chain is critical to their broader security and continued success. The OpenSSF exists in part to help organizations grapple with the complexity of their supply chains, promoting standards and technologies that help organizations faced with a newly disclosed security vulnerability in a popular open source library answer the question, “Where do we use this library so we can go update it?”

In my work in the public sector, I have an additional layer of complexity: the labyrinth of policies and procedures that I am required to follow to comply with security requirements imposed by my government customers. Don’t get me wrong, this is good complexity, put in place to protect critical infrastructure from advanced and evolving adversaries.

In this post I will describe some of the challenges public sector organizations face as they try to manage their supply chain and how the OpenSSF, with the broader open source community, can help address them. My hope is that meeting these challenges together, head-on will make us all more secure.

Public Sector Challenges

Exposure

Even in the public sector, open source software is being used everywhere. According to Black Duck Auditing Services’ Open Source Security and Risk Analysis (OSSRA) report, as of 2024 open source software comprises at least part of 96% of commercial code bases, with the average code base containing more than 500 open source components. A vulnerability in any one of those components might present significant risk if left unpatched and unmitigated.

Assuming the figures in the public sector are in-line with this report this represents a significant amount of exposure. Unique to the public sector are the risks that come along with this exposure, which don’t just include lost opportunities or productivity, but may put lives in jeopardy. For example, if part of a nation’s power grid is brought down by a cyberattack in mid-winter, people might freeze to death. The added risks, particularly where critical infrastructure is concerned, heighten the need for effective supply chain security.

Identification

Another area where public sector organizations face increased scrutiny is around identification, or what NIST SP 800-63A calls identity proofing. That document describes the requirements the US government imposes on itself when answering the question, “How do we know a person is who they claim to be?”

To provide a satisfactory answer to that question, a person needs to do a lot more than demonstrate ownership of an email address. It is a safe bet that organizations working in the public sector are going to follow a more rigorous identification standard for employees operating on their behalf, even if they do not follow NIST’s guidance to the letter.

It should be obvious that systems supporting the development of open source software do not adhere to this kind of a standard. GitHub, for example, does not ask to see your government-issued ID before allowing you to open an account. As a result, public sector actors must live with a double standard—proving to the government they are who they claim to be on the government’s terms but judging the identities of open source contributors by a different standard.

All that may not be a problem outright. Indeed, there are good reasons to allow open source development to happen without rigorous identification standards. It does, however, introduce some tensions that public sector organizations will need to deal with. For example, if a contractor is required to ensure none of the code in her product originated in a foreign country, how does she ensure that is true for any open source component she is using?

Approval Timelines

When I speak to others in aerospace and defense (part of the public sector, since our customers are governments), the conversation often turns to approval timelines to get software packages onto various, closed networks. The security teams responsible for these approvals have an important job, protecting the critical information on these networks from malicious software. How do they go about this work? Beats me. And even if I could tell you how it worked for one classified network, it would likely be quite different for another. What we have today is a patchwork system, an archipelago of isolated networks protected by security teams doing the best they can with the tools available to them. Historically this has meant manually curated spreadsheets, and lots of them.

This problem is not limited to networks used within aerospace and defense, but keeping the plight of these security groups in mind puts into sharp relief the basic problem faced by every group charged with protecting a network. There might be sufficient information available to make an informed decision, but there has historically been little available in the way of tooling to help bring greater confidence, ease and speed to the decision-making process.

How The Open Source Community Can Help

I have outlined three basic problems that the public sector faces: the risks associated with security vulnerabilities, the limits of identifying where open source software originates, and the timelines associated with getting software approved for use on isolated networks. Now let’s consider some of the ways in which the open source community can help alleviate these problems.

While there’s clearly nothing the open source community can do to directly reduce the risk posed to public infrastructure by vulnerabilities, there are ways maintainers can help the public sector make more informed decisions. Providing a SLSA Provenance alongside build artifacts is a great way to give public sector organizations confidence that what they’re using is what maintainers actually released. What’s more, a Level 3 Provenance gives a high level of assurance that the build process wasn’t interfered with at all. It is possible to achieve SLSA Level 3 by using GitHub Actions.

SLSA Provenance also provides useful information to the groups charged with securing networks (our third problem above). Going further, maintainers can also provide VEX documents with their releases to describe the known vulnerabilities and their status. One interesting use case that VEX supports is the ability to declare a vulnerability in an upstream dependency and assert that the vulnerability does not affect your project. That is useful information for a security group to have, even if they take it with a grain of salt.

That second problem—the impossibility of confidently identifying origin—is one that public sector groups will need to learn to live with. We cannot expect every open source contributor to identify themselves and the country where they reside. In light of this, perhaps the best path forward is for the open source community to develop reputation-based ways to score individual contributors. One could imagine ways of doing this that would both respect individual privacy and provide on-ramps for new contributors to begin building trust. This is almost certainly being done informally and piecemeal already. Systematizing it would only bring more transparency to the process, something that everyone would benefit from.

These kinds of third-party systems would be beneficial beyond contributor reputation as well. There are a variety of data sets useful to supply chain security that are likely being collected by organizations already. When possible, these should be made publicly available so the entire ecosystem can contribute to, help curate and benefit from them. But we cannot stop there. These data sets should be supported by easy-to-use interfaces that help security teams build confidence in the software they are being asked to allow on privileged networks. In short, we should welcome ways to make supply chain security and transparency a team sport.

Conclusion

To sum up, we have considered three challenges that public sector organizations face when securing their supply chains: The high potential impact of supply chain risks, the lack of ability to identify country of origin for open source software, and the long approval times to get new software onto closed networks. We also discussed how the open source community can work to close these gaps. It is worth repeating that doing so would make all of us—not just the public sector—more secure.

It is also gratifying to see the ways the OpenSSF is already contributing to this work, primarily by laying the foundation upon which this work can proceed. SLSA and VEX (in the form of OpenVEX) are both OpenSSF projects. Getting projects to adopt these technologies will take time and should be a priority.

About the Author

For nearly 20 years, Daniel has worked as a software engineer in the Defense and Aerospace industry. His experience ranges from embedded device drivers to large logistics and information systems. In recent years, he has focused on helping legacy programs adopt modern DevOps practices. Daniel works with the open source community as part of Lockheed Martin’s Open Source Program Office.