Industry-Wide Initiative to Support Open Source Security Gains New Commitments

Open Source Security Foundation adds new members, Citi, Comcast, DevSamurai, HPE, Mirantis and Snyk

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Mar 09, 2021, 12:00 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, March 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- OpenSSF, a cross-industry collaboration to secure the open source ecosystem, today announced new membership commitments to advance open source security education and best practices. New members include Citi, Comcast, DevSamurai, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Mirantis, and Snyk.

Open source software (OSS) has become pervasive in data centers, consumer devices and services, representing its value among technologists and businesses alike. Because of its development process, open source has a chain of contributors and dependencies before it ultimately reaches its end users. It is important that those responsible for their user or organization's security are able to understand and verify the security of this dependency supply chain.

"Open source software is embedded in the world's technology infrastructure and warrants our dedication to ensuring its security," said Kay Williams, Governing Board Chair, OpenSSF, and Supply Chain Security Lead, Azure Office of the CTO, Microsoft. "We welcome the latest OpenSSF new members and applaud their commitment to advancing supply chain security for open source software and its technology and business ecosystem."

The OpenSSF is a cross-industry collaboration that brings together technology leaders to improve the security of OSS. Its vision is to create a future where participants in the open source ecosystem use and share high quality software, with security handled proactively, by default, and as a matter of course. Its working groups include Securing Critical Projects, Security Tooling, Identifying Security Threats, Vulnerability Disclosures, Digital Identity Attestation, and Best Practices.

OpenSSF has more than 35 members and associate members contributing to working groups, technical initiatives and governing board and helping to advance open source security best practices. For more information on founding and new members, please visit: https://openssf.org/about/members/

Membership is not required to participate in the OpenSSF. For more information and to learn how to get involved, including information about participating in working groups and advisory forums, please visit https://openssf.org/getinvolved.

New Member Comments
Citi
"Working with the open source community is a key component in our security strategy, and we look forward to supporting the OpenSSF in its commitment to collaboration," said Jonathan Meadows, Citi's Managing Director for Cloud Security Engineering.

Comcast
"Open source software is a valuable resource in our ongoing work to create and continuously evolve great products and experiences for our customers, and we know how important it is to build security at every stage of development. We're honored to be part of this effort and look forward to collaborating," said Nithya Ruff, head of Comcast Open Source Program Office.

DevSamurai
"We are living in an interesting era, in which new IT technologies are changing all aspects of our lives everyday. Benefits come with risks, that can't be truer with open source software. Being a part of OpenSSF we expect to learn from and contribute to the community, together we strengthen security and eliminate risks throughout the software supply chain," Said Tam Nguyen, head of DevSecOps at DevSamurai.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise
"Open source software (OSS) has grown in popularity and will power the modern enterprise infrastructure," said Sunil James, Senior Director at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. "Its modular nature makes it difficult for customers to easily stitch together trust amongst disparate software and hardware components. Greater industry collaboration is critical to improving the security of OSS. Joining OpenSSF allows us to meaningfully collaborate with others on tooling and best practices to make OSS secure and trusted by default."

Mirantis
"As open source practitioners from our very founding, Mirantis has demonstrated its commitment to the values of transparency and collaboration in the open source community," said Chase Pettet, lead product security architect, Mirantis. "As members of the OpenSSF, we recognize the need for cross-industry security stakeholders to strengthen each other. Our customers will continue to rely on open source for their safety and assurance, and we will continue to support the development of secure open solutions."

Snyk
"Snyk values the security and open source communities and have been working closely with the Linux Foundation for many years," said Geva Solomonovich, CTO, Global Alliances, at Snyk. "We've been making security more accessible to developers by contributing to the Node.js Security Working Group and previous Core Infrastructure Initiative reports. Snyk also helps researchers and open source maintainers responsibly disclose vulnerabilities and assign CVEs. Snyk is thrilled to become an official OSSF member, and we look forward to working with others equally committed to advancing open source security throughout the full software development lifecycle."

About the Open Source Security Foundation (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 the 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.

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 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, 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 our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact
Jennifer Cloer
for the Linux Foundation
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SOURCE The Linux Foundation