Open Source Security Foundation Attracts New Commitments, Advances Key Initiatives in Weeks Since White House Security Summit

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Mar 01, 2022, 08:59 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, March 1, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) a cross-industry organization hosted at the Linux Foundation that brings together the world's most important open source security initiatives, today announced 20 new organizations have joined OpenSSF to help identify and fix security vulnerabilities in open source software and develop improved tooling, training, research, best practices, and vulnerability disclosure practices. It is also announcing the latest milestones achieved across a variety of its technical initiatives, all of which underscore the cross-industry momentum taking place as a result of increasing awareness in the wake of recent security incidents and since the recent White House Open Source Security Summit and recent Congressional hearings.

"The time is clearly now for this community to make real progress on software security. Since open source is the foundation on which all software is built, the work we do at OpenSSF with contributions from companies and individuals from around the world is fundamental to that progress," said Brian Behlendorf, executive director at OpenSSF. "We've never had more support or focus on building, sustaining and securing the software that underpins all of our lives, and we're happy to be the neutral forum where this can happen."

New Premier Member commitments come from 1Password, Citi, Coinbase, Huawei Technologies, JFrog and Wipro. New General Member commitments come from Accuknox, Alibaba Cloud, Block, Inc, Blockchain Technology Partners, Catena Cyber, Chainguard, Cloudsmith, DeployHub, MongoDB, NCC Group, ReversingLabs, Spotify, Teleport and Wingtecher Technology. New Associate Members include MITRE and OpenUK. For a complete review of the OpenSSF member roster, please visit: https://openssf.org/about/members/

These commitments come on the heels of the recent White House Open Source Security Summit where the Linux Foundation and OpenSSF represented hundreds of its project communities and discussed how best to support software security and open source security posture going forward. This underscored a major milestone in the Linux Foundation's engagement with the public sector and underscores its position to support not only the projects it hosts but all of the world's most critical open source infrastructure.

Since the OpenSSF announced initial commitments in October, the community has continued to advance the OpenSSF mission. Some selected highlights include:

New Alpha-Omega Project Launches with $5m Investment to Improve OSS Security Posture
OpenSSF also recently announced the Alpha-Omega Project to improve the security posture of open source software (OSS) through direct engagement of software security experts and automated security testing. It is initially supported by Microsoft and Google with a combined investment of $5 million. The Project improves global OSS supply chain security by working with project maintainers to systematically look for new, as-yet-undiscovered vulnerabilities in open source code, and get them fixed. "Alpha" will work with the maintainers of the most critical open source projects to help them identify and fix security vulnerabilities, and improve their security posture. "Omega" will identify at least 10,000 widely deployed OSS projects where it can apply automated security analysis, scoring, and remediation guidance to their open source maintainer communities.

Automated Security Tool, Scorecards, Increases Scans from 50,000 to 1 Million Projects
Scorecards is an OpenSSF project that helps open source users understand the risks of the dependencies they consume. OpenSSF members GitHub and Google recently announced Scorecards v4, which includes Scorecards GitHub Workflow Action to automate identification of how changes to a project affected its security. It also includes License Check to detect the presence of a project license and Dangerous-Workflow check to detect dangerous usage of the pull_request_target trigger and risks of script injections in GitHub workflows. The Scorecards project has also increased the scale of scans from 50,000 projects to one million projects identified as most critical based on their number of direct dependencies, giving a more detailed view of the ecosystem and strengthening supply chain security as users see improved coverage of their dependencies.

Project Sigstore Sees Massive Contribution, Adoption to Sign, Verify and Protect OSS Sigstore recently released a project update that reported nearly 500 contributors, more than 3,000 commits and more than one million entries in Rekor. For more information on what is driving this adoption, please visit the Sigstore blog.

The "Great MFA Distribution" Distributes Codes to Claim Free Hardware Security Tokens to Almost 1000 Top OSS Developers. In the pursuit of encouraging wider adoption of multi-factor authentication (MFA) by developers of critical open source projects, The Securing Critical Projects Working Group coordinated the distribution of nearly 1000 codes for free MFA tokens (graciously donated by Google and Github) to developers of the 100 most critical open source projects. This is a small but critical step in avoiding supply chain attacks based on stolen credentials of key developers.

To join OpenSSF and/or contribute to these important initiatives, please visit: https://openssf.org/

Premier Member Quotes
1Password
"We're proud to be among like-minded organizations and individuals that share a collective commitment to improving the security posture of open source software," said Pedro Canahuati, Chief Technology Officer at 1Password. "Much of the technology we use today is built on open source software. Given 1Password's human-centric approach to building user-friendly applications, it's important to us that its integrity and security is protected."

Citi
"The security of open source software and its supply chain is an essential aspect to Citi. We have worked with the open source community on bolstering security in these areas and we look forward to strengthening this mission by joining the Open Source Security Foundation," said Jonathan Meadows, Head of Cloud & Application Security Engineering, Citibank.

Coinbase
"Coinbase is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange, and the security of our open source dependencies -- as well as the broader crypto ecosystem -- is paramount. The OpenSSF's goals align with our own, and Coinbase is proud to be contributing to increasing the security of open source software for the benefit of all," said Jordan Harband, Staff Developer Relations Engineer, Coinbase.

Huawei Technologies
"The importance of open source software security is well recognized by the customer, industry and government. It is time for the community to take strategic, continuous, effective and efficient actions to advance the open source software security posture. We are very glad to see OpenSSF launching initiatives (Scorecard, Alpha-Omega, SigStore, etc.) to improve the open source software security directly," said Dr. Kai Chen, Chief Security Strategist, Huawei. "Huawei commits to strengthen investment on cybersecurity and to maintain a global, secure and resilient open source software supply chain."

JFrog
"Open source software is the foundation of today's modern systems that run enterprises and government organizations alike – making software part of a nation's critical infrastructure," said Stephen Chin, VP of Developer Relations, JFrog. "JFrog is honored to be part of OpenSSF to accelerate innovation and advancement in supply chain security. Projects coming out of OpenSFF help make JFrog's liquid software vision a secure reality."

Wipro
"With the increasing adoption of open source software and its growing importance in enabling innovation and transformation, comes commensurate cybersecurity risks. The community needs a concerted effort to address them. We are excited to join the governing board of OpenSSF to collaborate with other members on defining and building set of solutions and frameworks and best practices to help ensure the integrity of the open source software supply chain and contribute our domain expertise, breadth of resources and global reach to this important effort," said Subha Tatavarti, CTO, Wipro Limited.

General Member Quotes
Accuknox
"In the Shift Left, DevSecOps Developer-led adoption of Security Tools and platforms an OpenSource led approach is an imperative. We are thrilled to see OpenSSF launching path breaking initiatives to help end-users and technology providers harness the power of open source and contribute to the collective knowledge capital," said Nat Natraj, co-founder, CEO, AccuKnox.

Alibaba Cloud
"Open Source software has become a key software supply chain of IT, and Open Source software security has a huge impact on infrastructure security. Alibaba Cloud, as the world's leading cloud vendor that always puts security and data privacy as the priority, is keeping investing in security research. For a long time, the public has felt that open source software is very safe because of transparency, all software developers can review the code, find and fix vulnerabilities. But In fact, there are many widely used open-source software that is still possible to have security bugs that have not been noticed for a long time. It is great to have an organization like OpenSSF, which can connect so many great companies and open source communities to advance open source security for all. As a member of Open Source Security Foundation, we're looking forward to collaborating with OpenSSF to strengthen the Open Source security," said Xin Ouyang, Head of Alibaba Cloud Security, Alibaba Cloud.

Block, Inc.
"Block is very excited to join with other industry leaders to help step up the quality of open source security. I strongly believe that as an industry, it is our priority to address security concerns in a supply chain that we all use. We may compete on products, but we should never compete on security, and OSSF is a fantastic example of this idea," said Jim Higgins, CISO of Block.

Blockchain Technology Partners
"Open source software is mainstream and underpins much of the world's critical infrastructure as well as powering enterprises across the globe. Against this backdrop, OpenSSF's mission to secure the open source supply chain is fundamental to our future," said Duncan Johnston-Watt, CEO and Co-founder of Blockchain Technology Partners. "Collaboration is key to OpenSSF's success and so we are delighted to contribute to this initiative which complements our existing involvement in the Hyperledger Foundation, CNCF and LF Energy."

Catena Cyber
"Open source leads to a massive sharing of knowledge. Beyond the quantity of information, the quality of it becomes important to bring value to society," said Philippe Antoine, CEO of Catenacyber. "We are glad to join OpenSSF to contribute to improving the cybersecurity of open source projects through fuzzing and other means. Let's fix all the bugs!"

Chainguard
"Making the software lifecycle secure by default is increasingly critical as open source has become the digital backbone of the world. A vibrant, open software security ecosystem is essential to that mission. We are excited to be members of the Open Source Security Foundation and to continue working with the community to make the software lifecycle secure by default," said Tracy Miranda, head of open source at Chainguard.

Cloudsmith
"Having a single source of truth for software artifacts has never been more vital to supply chains - especially for the open-source community. OSS engineers need trust and provenance, and a trusted source for secure end-to-end software delivery, from build through to production. At Cloudsmith, our mission is to evolve the cloud-native supply chain, making it simple for the OSS community to secure their software delivery at scale through Continuous Packaging. We are thrilled to join OpenSSF, and we look forward to being part of the continued mission to improve the security posture of open source software universally," said Alan Carson, CEO at Cloudsmith.

DeployHub
"At DeployHub we have been laser focused on tracking the consumption of microservices, including their versions. These relationships make up our new application-level Software Bill of Materials (SBOMS). There is no better place to have this supply chain conversation than the OpenSSF," explains Tracy Ragan, CEO DeployHub.

MongoDB
"As all industries increasingly rely upon open source software to deliver digital experiences, it is our collective responsibility to help maintain a vibrant and secure ecosystem," said Lena Smart, Chief Information Security Officer, MongoDB. "You can have all the tools in the world, but at the end of the day, it is people across multiple organizations around the world working together that will ensure an expansive cybersecurity program. One of MongoDB's values is "Build Together" and we're excited to join and further cross-industry collaboration to move the security of open source software forward."

NCC Group
"Even if your code is perfectly secure, chances are it has vulnerable dependencies. And the number of unpatched vulnerabilities "in the wild" outpaces the speed at which the security community can patch or even identify them. Security as it is practiced now doesn't scale at the rate needed to keep things at least as secure as they were yesterday, and we have compelling reasons to expect this to get even worse for defenders. However, through harnessing dedicated investment and coordinating industry-wide efforts to improve the security of the most critical open source components and find scalable interventions for the entire ecosystem, we have an opportunity to improve software security at a massive scale. But we can only do this together, and it is for this reason that NCC Group is excited to contribute to the work of OpenSSF," said Jennifer Fernick, SVP & Global Head of Research at cybersecurity consulting firm NCC Group.

ReversingLabs
"The software supply chain has become a major risk vector for new threats, including those from the open source ecosystem. The inherent dependencies and complexities of the modern software supply chain means that companies often lack visibility and the ability to track each component through the entire software development process. Recognizing these challenges, ReversingLabs is pleased to join the OpenSSF and offer its contributions to the community that help drive the automation of more comprehensive software bills of material and mitigate software supply chain and package release risks," said Mario Vuksan, CEO and Co-founder, ReversingLabs.

Spotify
"As a technical community we all have a responsibility to improve the security and trust of an open source ecosystem that so many of us rely upon. Spotify has always relied on open source software, and contributes to the community through projects like Backstage. We believe open source software forms the backbone of our industry and we look forward to supporting the foundation's goal of ensuring everyone can depend on a healthy and secure software ecosystem," said Tyson Singer, VP, Head of Technology and Platforms at Spotify.

Teleport
"The complexity of modern infrastructure has broadened attack surface areas to the point where data breaches are just about an everyday occurrence," said Ev Kontsevoy, CEO of Teleport. "These risks have been exacerbated by the rise of remote and hybrid workplaces. With an eye on global attacks, the open source community's commitment to improving open source security is critical to ushering in a new era of computing. Offering a solution to increase security, ease usability, and help scale enterprise development access, Teleport is pleased to be a part of the OpenSSF."

Wingtecher Technology
"As a fast-growing startup, Wingtecher focuses on exploring the technologies that secure various kinds of open source softwares. We are excited to join OpenSSF, and ready to collaborate with the community to overcome the emerging open source security challenges worldwide," said Vincent Li, COO Wingtecher Technology.

About OpenSSF
Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the OpenSSF (launched in August 2020) is a cross-industry organization that brings together the industry's most important open source security initiatives and the individuals and companies that support them. It combines the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), founded in response to the 2014 Heartbleed bug, and the Open Source Security Coalition, founded by the GitHub Security Lab to build a community to support open source security for decades to come. 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: https://openssf.org/

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation and its projects are supported by more than 1,800 members and is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation's projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, Hyperledger, RISC-V, and more. The Linux Foundation's methodology 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.

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.

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