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Aug 01
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🎉 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! 🎉

Jul 23
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Case Study: Google Secures Machine Learning Models with sigstore

By Blog, Case Studies

As machine learning (ML) evolves at lightning speed, so do the threats. The rise of large models like LLMs has accelerated innovation—but also introduced serious vulnerabilities. Data poisoning, model tampering, and unverifiable origins are not theoretical—they’re real risks that impact the entire ML supply chain.

Model hubs, platforms for data scientists to share models and datasets, recognized the challenge: How could they ensure the models hosted on their platform were authentic and safe?

That’s where Google’s Open Source Security Team (GOSST), sigstore, and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) stepped in. Together, we created the OpenSSF Model Signing (OMS) specification, an industry standard for signing AI models. We then integrated OMS into major model hubs such as NVIDIA’s NGC and Google’s Kaggle.

The Solution: Seamless Model Signing Built into Model Hubs

We partnered with Kaggle to experiment with how to make the model signing easier without disrupting publishing UX.

“The simplest solution to securing models is: sign the model when you train it and verify it every time you use it.”
 — Mihai Maruseac, Staff Software Engineer, Google

Key features of the prototyped implementation:

  • Model authors could use the same model hub upload tools and processes to upload their models, but, behind the scenes, these models would be automatically signed during the upload process.
  • Each model is signed using the uploader’s identity on the model hub, via OpenID Connect (OIDC). Model hubs should become OIDC providers to ensure that they can sign the model during upload.
  • Model hubs use sigstore to obtain a short-lived certificate, sign the model, and store the signature alongside the model.
  • Verification is automatic and transparent—the model hub verifies the signature and displays its status. A “signed” status confirms the model’s authenticity.
  • Users can independently verify signatures by using a notebook hosted on the model hub, or downloading the model and the signature and verifying using the `model_signing` CLI.
  • Model repositories implement access controls (ACLs) to ensure that only authorized users can sign on behalf of specific organizations.
  • All signing events are logged in the sigstore transparency log, providing a complete audit trail.
  • Future plans include GUAC integration for generating AI-BOMs and inspecting ML supply chains for incident response and transparency.

The process dramatically improves trust and provenance while remaining invisible to most users.

The Result: A Blueprint for Securing AI Models

With sigstore integrated, the experiment with Kaggle proved that model hubs can offer a verified ML ecosystem. Users know that what they download hasn’t been tampered with or misattributed. Each model is cryptographically signed and tied to the author’s identity—no more guessing whether a model came from “Meta” or a spoofed account.

“If we reach a state where all claims about ML systems and metadata are tamperproof, tied to identity, and verifiable by the tools ML developers already use—we can inspect the ML supply chain immediately in case of incidents.”
 — Mihai Maruseac, Staff Software Engineer, Google

This solution serves as a model for the broader ecosystem. Platforms hosting datasets and models can adopt similar practices using open tools like sigstore, backed by community-driven standards through OpenSSF.

Get Involved & Learn More

Join the OpenSSF Community
Be part of the movement to secure open source software, including AI/ML systems. → Join the AI/ML Security WG

Explore sigstore
See how sigstore enables secure, transparent signing for software and models. → Visit sigstore

Learn About Google’s Open Source Security Efforts
Discover how Google is advancing supply chain security in open source and machine learning. → Google Open Source Security Team

Learn More about Kaggle
Explore how Kaggle is evolving into a secure hub for trustworthy ML models. → Visit Kaggle

Watch the Talk
Title: Taming the Wild West of ML: Practical Model Signing With sigstore on Kaggle
Speaker: Mihai Maruseac, Google
Event: OpenSSF Community Day North America – June 26, 2025
Watch the talk → YouTube

Jun 27
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On-Demand Webinar: Cybersecurity Skills, Simplified

By Blog

A Framework That Works

Cybersecurity isn’t just the responsibility of a dedicated team anymore. Whether you’re an engineer, a product owner, or part of the executive suite, your day-to-day decisions have a direct impact on your organization’s security. That was the clear message from the expert panel featured in our webinar, Cybersecurity Skills: A Framework That Works — now available to watch on demand.

Leaders from IBM, Intel, Linux Foundation Education and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) share real-world insights on how their organizations are tackling one of today’s biggest challenges: upskilling the entire workforce in security. The panelists discussed the new Cybersecurity Skills Framework, an open, flexible tool designed to help teams identify the right skills for the right roles — and actually get started improving them. It’s practical, customizable, and already helping global organizations raise their security posture.

In the webinar, you’ll hear how to:

  • Map skill requirements across teams using security OKRs
  • Operationalize training at scale with integrated learning plans
  • Lead the charge to implement open, accessible pathways for cybersecurity education

The conversation is packed with actionable advice, whether you’re building a security training program or just want to understand where you or your team stands.

🎥Access the Cybersecurity Skills, Simplified Webinar

BONUS: Receive a 30% Discount for any Security-Related Course, Certification or Bundle Just for Watching

Need to Close the Skills Gap Across Your Team or Enterprise?

Get in Touch Today!

Jun 27
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OpenSSF at UN Open Source Week 2025: Securing the Supply Chain Through Global Collaboration

By Blog

OpenSSF participated in the 2025 UN Open Source Week, a global gathering of participants hosted by the United Nations Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies, focused on harnessing open source innovation to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Held in New York City, the event gathered technology leaders, policymakers, and open source advocates to address critical global challenges.

On June 20, OpenSSF joined a featured panel discussion during a community-led side event curated by RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, OpenForum Europe, and CURIOSS. The panel, titled “Securing the Supply Chain Through Global Collaboration,” explored how standardized practices and international cooperation enhance open source software security and align with emerging regulatory frameworks such as the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).

Panelists included:

  • Adrianne Marcum, Chief of Staff, OpenSSF
  • Arun Gupta, Vice President Developer Programs, Intel and Organizer, UN Tech Over Hackathon
  • David A. Wheeler, Adjunct Professor, George Mason University, and Director of Open Source Supply Chain Security, The Linux Foundation
  • Scott Clinton, Co-chair, Board of Directors, OWASP Gen AI Security Project

The session highlighted the critical need for international cooperation to secure global software systems effectively. Panelists discussed the emerging role of generative AI (GenAI) and its implications for open source security. The importance of developer education in how to develop secure software was also noted; as developers must increasingly review GenAI results, they will need more, not less, education.

“It was both a great opportunity to share the work of the Gen AI Security Project and insights on the challenges and benefits generative AI brings to our discussion on securing open source and the software supply chain,” said Scott Clinton.

“The United Nations brought together a global community where nations become collaborators rather than competitors,” added Arun Gupta. “It’s thrilling to see the open source community advancing solutions for global problems.”

UN Tech Over Hackathon: Innovation and Stewardship

Earlier that week (June 16–17), the UN Tech Over Hackathon drew over 200 global innovators to address SDG-aligned challenges through open source technology. The hackathon featured three distinct tracks:

  • Ahead of the Storm: A child-focused climate emergency analytics initiative in partnership with UNICEF.
  • Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon: Collaborative enhancement of UN-related historical content.
  • Maintain-a-Thon: Emphasized sustainability and ongoing stewardship of open source infrastructure.

The Maintain-a-Thon, organized in partnership with Alpha-Omega and the Sovereign Tech Agency, engaged over 40 participants across 15 breakout sessions. Senior maintainers offered guidance on issue triage, documentation improvements, and best practices for long-term project maintenance, reinforcing open source software’s foundational role in global digital infrastructure.

🔗 Read the official UN Tech Over press release
🔗 Read Arun Gupta’s blog post on “Ahead of the Storm”

The Road Ahead

UN Open Source Week 2025 underscored the importance of collaborative innovation in securing and sustaining digital public infrastructure. Aligned with its mission, OpenSSF remains dedicated to facilitating global cooperation, promoting secure-by-design best practices, providing educational resources, and supporting innovative technical initiatives. By empowering maintainers and contributors of all skill levels, OpenSSF aims to ensure open source software remains trusted, secure, and reliable for everyone.

Jun 26
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OpenSSF Welcomes New Members and Presents Golden Egg Award

By Blog, Press Release

Foundation furthers mission to enhance the security of open source software 

DENVER – OpenSSF Community Day North America – June 26, 2025 – The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), a cross-industry initiative of the Linux Foundation that focuses on sustainably securing open source software (OSS), welcomes six new members from leading technology and security companies. New general members include balena, Buildkite, Canonical, Trace Machina, and Triam Security and associate members include Erlang Ecosystem Foundation (EEF). The Foundation also presents the Golden Egg Award during OpenSSF Community Day NA 2025.

“We are thrilled to welcome six new member companies and honor existing contributors during our annual North America Community Day event this week,” said Steve Fernandez, General Manager at OpenSSF. “As companies expand their global footprint and depend more and more on interconnected technologies, it is vital we work together to advance open source security at every layer – from code to systems to people. With the support of our new members, we can share best practices, push for standards and ensure security is front and center in all development.”

Golden Egg Award Recipients

The OpenSSF continues to shine a light on those who go above and beyond in our community with the Golden Egg Awards. The Golden Egg symbolizes gratitude for awardees’ selfless dedication to securing open source projects through community engagement, engineering, innovation, and thoughtful leadership. This year, we celebrate:

  • Ian Dunbar-Hall (Lockheed Martin) – for contributions to the bomctl and SBOMit projects
  • Hayden Blauzvern (Google) – for leadership in the Sigstore project
  • Marcela Melara (Intel) – for contributions to SLSA and leadership in the BEAR Working Group 
  • Yesenia Yser (Microsoft) – for work as a podcast co-host and leadership in the BEAR Working Group 
  • Zach Steindler (GitHub) – for leadership on the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) and in the Securing Software Repositories Working Group
  • Munehiro “Muuhh” Ikeda – for work as an LF Japan Evangelist and helping to put together OpenSSF Community Day Japan
  • Adolfo “Puerco” Garcia Veytia – for support on Protobom, OpenVEX and Baseline projects

Their efforts have made a lasting impact on the open source security ecosystem, and we are deeply grateful for their continued contributions.

Project Updates

OpenSSF is supported by more than 3,156 technical contributors across OpenSSF projects – providing a vendor-neutral partner to affiliated open source foundations and projects. Recent project updates include:

  • Gittuf, a platform-agnostic Git security system, has advanced to an incubating project under OpenSSF. This milestone marks the maturity and adoption of the project.
  • OpenBao, a software solution to manage, store, and distribute sensitive data including secrets, certificates, and key, joined OpenSSF as a sandbox project
  • Open Source Project Security Baseline (OSPS Baseline), which provides a structured set of security requirements aligned with international cybersecurity frameworks, standards, and regulations, aiming to bolster the security posture of open source software projects, was released.
  • Model Signing released version 1.0 to secure the machine learning supply chain.
  • GUAC released version 1.0 to bring stability to the core functionality.
  • SLSA released version 1.1 RC2 to enhance the clarity and usability of the original specification.

Events and Gatherings

New and existing OpenSSF members are gathering this week in Denver at the annual OpenSSF Community Day NA 2025. Join the community at upcoming 2025 OpenSSF-hosted events, including OpenSSF Community Day India, OpenSSF Community Day Europe, OpenSSF Community Day Korea, and Open Source SecurityCon 2025.

Additional Resources

Supporting Quotes

“At balena, we understand that securing edge computing and IoT solutions is critical for all companies deploying connected devices. As developers focused on enabling reliable and secure operations with balenaCloud, we’re deeply committed to sharing our knowledge and expertise. We’re proud to join OpenSSF to contribute to open collaboration, believing that together we can build more mature security solutions that truly help companies protect their edge fleets and raise collective awareness across the open-source ecosystem.”

– Harald Fischer, Security Aspect Lead, balena

“Joining OpenSSF is a natural extension of Buildkite’s mission to empower teams with secure, scalable, and resilient software delivery. With Buildkite Package Registries, our customers get SLSA-compliant software provenance built in. There’s no complex setup or extra tooling required. We’ve done the heavy lifting so teams can securely publish trusted artifacts from Buildkite Pipelines with minimal effort. We’re excited to collaborate with the OpenSSF community to raise the bar for open source software supply chain security.”

– Ken Thompson, Vice President of Product Management, Buildkite

“Protecting the security of the open source ecosystem is not an easy feat, nor one that can be tackled by any single industry player. OpenSSF leads projects that are shaping this vast landscape. Canonical is proud to join OpenSSF on its mission to spearhead open source security across the entire market. For over 20 years we have delivered security-focused products and services across a broad spectrum of open source technologies. In today’s world, software security, reliability, and provenance is more important than ever. Together we will write the next chapter for open source security frameworks, processes and tools for the benefit of all users.”

– Luci Stanescu, Security Engineering Manager, Canonical

“Starting in 2024, the EEF’s Security WG focused community resources on improving our supply chain infrastructure and tooling to enable us to comply with present and upcoming cybersecurity laws and directives. This year we achieved OpenChain Certification (ISO/IEC 5230) for the core Erlang and Elixir libraries and tooling, and also became the default CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) for all open-source Erlang, Elixir and Gleam language packages. Joining the OpenSSF has been instrumental in connecting us to experts in the field and facilitating relationships with security practitioners in other open-source projects.” 

– Alistair Woodman, Board Chair, Erlang Ecosystem Foundation

“Trace Machina is a technology company, founded in September 2023, that builds infrastructure software for developers to go faster. Our current core product, NativeLink, is a build caching and remote execution platform that speeds up compute-heavy work. As a company we believe both in building our products open source whenever possible, and in supporting the open source ecosystem and community. We believe open source software is a crucial philosophy in technology, especially in the security space. We’re thrilled to join the OpenSSF as a member organization and to continue being active in this wonderful community.” 

– Tyrone Greenfield, Chief of Staff, Trace Machina

“Triam Security is proud to join the Open-Source Security Foundation to support its mission of strengthening the security posture of critical open source software. As container security vulnerabilities continue to pose significant risks to the software supply chain, our expertise in implementing SLSA Level 3/4 controls and building near-zero CVE solutions through CleanStart aligns perfectly with OpenSSF’s supply chain security initiatives. We look forward to collaborating with the community on advancing SLSA adoption, developing security best practices, improving vulnerability management processes, and promoting standards that enhance the security, transparency, and trust in the open-source ecosystem.”

– Biswajit De, CTO, Triam Security

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. 

Media Contact
Natasha Woods
The Linux Foundation

PR@linuxfoundation.org