Swapnil Bhartiya: AI powered tools have made it extremely easy to find vulnerabilities in open source code. What used to take security researchers weeks of manual work now takes an AI tool minutes. And every organization is doing that. They are scanning the same open source packages independently. And more people who know about these unpatched vulnerabilities before the fake ships, the higher the odds that it leaks to attackers before it is patched. The irony is a bank and a hospital may be using the same obscure open source library. They may find those vulnerability, but they don’t talk to each other and they won’t even know unless or until it’s exploited. To solve this problem, Linux foundation is launching a new project. And to address this challenge, the Linux foundation is announcing a new project called Equities. It’s kind of a shared coordination layer sitting between the people who find vulnerabilities and the open source maintainers who actually have to fix them. That’s my understanding of what this project is all about. And today we have with us once again Christopher Robinson or Krob, CTO of OpenSSF and Chief Security Architect at the Linux foundation to walk us through it. First of all, Krub, it’s great to have you back on the show and tell me how close or far I was from the real problem that we are facing due to open source and AI fighting against each other. Sometimes I feel that hey, that’s a good thing because AI is finding a lot of vulnerabilities which we could not find otherwise. But at the same time the volume, the lack of coordination is creating a lot of challenges. So first of all, correct me how far I was from the reality.

CRob: Oh, thank you for having me. And you were actually pretty close. It was around the fall of last year where the community really recognized that there was this increased use of these LLMs and other AI enabled tools. And we had a lot of conversations in the community and across the ecosystem about AI slop. And it was the case that last year many people were using these tools and they were just throwing reports over the walls at upstream maintainers and corporations. And the quality, to be perfectly blunt, was pretty terrible. And there was this huge effort and the open SSF was in talking about, in part of our Vulnerability Disclosure working group. Let’s write some guidance for researchers and for projects to try to help mitigate this AI slop problem. Around the beginning of this year, January, February, something changed in those advanced models and the reports actually started to get pretty good. And this, this isn’t universally, they, they aren’t a universally beloved thing. But generally the quality and the data you got out of these types of tools was much, much better. And like thinking about like where we are today in the summer, the, the reports are almost as good as if you had a professional kind of seasoned security researcher kind of applying their time. And you’re absolutely right. You know, it used to take researchers weeks, months, sometimes maybe a year to kind of think through and figure out how to present this vulnerability and to get it fixed. And the time now we have with these automated tools like using LLMs, whether it’s an advanced kind of frontier style model like a Mythos style thing, or even if it’s an open weight, open source model like a Kimi, where we’re seeing very good results with these open weight models and the time has been compressed where now we have hours after a public model finds something before potentially somebody else can discover it. You were very close.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Thank you. Now talk a bit about, first of all, how do you say acrites and what is this project all about? What is the idea behind the project and how it’s going to address this problem.

CRob: So the project name is Project Akrites and you can go to akretes.org to kind of see our public information and as we move forward and start executing on the program, you’ll see more information both on the website and then our GitHub repository and more public communications. And what we’ve noticed is there are a lot of people, whether you are, you know, somebody that has a $20 chat GPT or a Claude code account and you want to do scanning, or you’re a very large organization that might have access to some of these larger things where there’s been a substantial amount of stakeholders that have been trying to find and figure out what to do with all of these potential vulnerability reports. And that’s where a project A creed stands. In the accretae were a group of Byzantine soldiers that used to live out in the outskirts of the Byzantium empire. And they were kind of like an early warning system. They would keep an eye on things. They were defenders of the frontier. And then as invaders were coming or if there was trouble, they would be the ones that would help try to address that particular problem, but then make sure that everybody back in the empire was warned. And that’s where that kind of thinking that we’re at is. Again, there were a lot of people looking to try to find these problems, but very few were thinking about the problem of what do I do with all these findings? How do I get them Upstream and that again, thinking about last year with the reaction of upstream to AI slope is the worst possible case is somebody runs a scanner and we start filing thousands of reports without arming upstream so that they can understand how to what the report is, how they can take action and kind of giving them additional tools and resources so that they can address those findings in something that’s acceptable within that upstream community.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you also talk a bit about why launch this now? Was there any specific model moment or catalyst that pushed this from kind of an idea, a thought process to a reality?

CRob: Well, if you’ve been around the open SSF for any period of time, people the longtime players at home might remember we had a thing called the Mobilization Plan about four or five years ago and actually one of the work streams that was identified by our community and the board was this incident response team. And at the time the problem wasn’t as pressing or wasn’t as obvious to folks and that didn’t move forward. But this year, starting off with efforts like Anthropic’s Glasswing program, what OpenAI has done with GPT Cyber and these other programs is now people have access to these very capable advanced models and these tools can do much more sophisticated work than your traditional security scanner can do. And we started to those organizations started to recognize that they were finding dozens, hundreds, potentially thousands of findings on projects across the open source ecosystem. And again we’ve all joined together to try to make sure that those are responsibly disclosed and making sure that they’re empathetic to the upstream project and then most importantly that there is some type of public treatment so that when these issues get released as general availability public disclosure, that everybody that consumes that package has access to those fixes as quickly as possible.

Swapnil Bhartiya: If you look at some of these major open source projects that literally are people may not realize the backbone and foundation of modern economy Linux kernel or Kubernetes. There are so many open source projects. What does AI and the security of these projects mean in this new world where vulnerabilities can be found easily? And now the problem is that both good guys and bad guys are looking at it. And I always say as good guys you have to be right 101% time, bad guys have to be right only once. So how do you look at this word?

CRob: And from our perspective, obviously open source is deeply ingrained in our DNA and we feel that this is the most effective model of development and co engineering in existence. And if you look at these frontier model systems, with the exception of like some of the hardware components and then some of the like the training information. All of these things are deeply, deeply dependent upon open source libraries and communities for their commercial offerings. So it really depends on who you are and kind of what resources you have access to. There are amazing for fee paid services that these models have some great capabilities. But thinking about open weight and open model models we feel that that is a great approach that people can effectively leverage because you can understand much better just like open source code where you can understand how this model was developed, how it was trained, how the decisions are made with the weight. So this is a path that we think is just as important. And while the open weight models and the newer open source things might not have all of some of the advanced capabilities like some of these frontier models are very sophisticated in their ability to do vulnerability chaining. You can do that with you know, less cost models. You don’t have to go with the most expensive thing on the planet, but you also get very good results. And what we’ve seen in our testing and engagement is that the open weight stuff actually we, we kind of prefer because we have better ability to steer how that, how that information is trained and then share that and then people can look at the decisions we made or as we were putting the model together and that’s where you can have like this expert system that’s trained to think just like me and I can have that conversation and not worry about disclosing confidential information to a potentially public resource where other people share.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Thank you. Now I have been tracking of course open SSF since early days and a lot of security related projects that predates Open SSF same way you have been tracking them. Talk a bit about how is it this project equities different from OpenSSF? Is it complementing it? Is it competing? I mean there is no competition. It’s always cooperation in open source world. But I just want to understand the, the, the existence of these, these different projects. Are the goals different or the goals are same? Is new problems emerging so you have to come up with more focused projects. So I just talk about that.

CRob: It’s very definitely complementary efforts the Open SSF has. We’re coming up on our sixth anniversary. We have a six year track record of delivering best practices, guidance, documentation, training, public policy, engagement and those are things that will continue. And you can think of OpenSSL OpenSSL along the lines of kind of a SDLC a best practices and secure by design Focus Akrites is laser focused on one piece of the SDLC and That is the end phases where you’re in maintenance and updates, laser focused on finding the vulnerabilities, making sure that those vulnerabilities are accurately documented, and then that those reports are passed up to some type of upstream project for determination on how it goes out the door. So again, it’s very complimentary. We have some work within the OpenSSF that talks about this piece, our vulnerability disclosure working group. And ultimately what the plan is, is as the accrete cert, the security incident response team starts getting in there and working with upstream projects and across the ecosystem is we’re gonna be cataloging these good practices and then passing them back over to the OpenSSF for creation of a white paper or training, kind of whatever the particular artifact is needed. And again kind of leaning into that sub expertise of that community as opposed to incident response, which is kind of a very small slice of the world.

Swapnil Bhartiya: And as I was saying in the very beginning that it’s kind of neutral, commonplace where no matter who can. So if organizations do want to get involved, should they get involved with open SSH or should they get involved with equities? Because sometimes it may lead to confusion. Hey, who should we talk to? What should. What about you? So give us some guidance on who they should talk to and what does the membership involvement looks like there?

CRob: It depends on which kind of story resonates with the particular stakeholder. So if you are interested in that long term sustainability, if you’re interested in tooling and training and education to help the supply chain, OpenSSF is the place to go. If you feel that you have security engineering like penetration testing, red team product security experience and you want to help with this particular problem and helping set some of these norms and helping broadly upstream coordination has been a challenge for the industry and this is the first effort. But so if you’re interested in focusing on that specific piece of the problem, that’s where you can onboard is going through the accreties project. The accreties we have a couple different membership levels and broadly the core tenet is that if you’re going to participate within this group, you not only need to have, you know, pay your membership dues, but there’s also a requirement of dedicating subject matter experts, engineers to the effort. And that’s where the idea is. We have, we’ll have a core team of incident responders and we’ll build this coalition of RED in experts from across the ecosystem so that when we need assistance, or maybe we have your engineers have specific relationships with critical projects, for example, It’d be great to have you in there participating, trying to help us help that project specifically or if you had more generalized experiences. But again, if you’re looking to do, you know, the analysis of vulnerability reports and then kind of the negotiation, communication and disclosure of those, that’s one particular set of skills. But if you’re more interested in kind of that long term sustainability helping set standards like salsa, which is the kind of the de facto supply chain security standard that’s more appropriate for the open SSF where the accreties will not be doing that type of longer term sustainability type things.

Swapnil Bhartiya: You and I were crazy about CRA back then, you know, and we always talk about that because of AI that is also becoming a big problem from. If I ask you to wear your CRA advocacy hat for a few seconds, how is this going to help with that?

CRob: Well, I. The theory is that if we’re able to get these vulnerabilities discovered and then have fixes distributed upstream more quickly, hopefully that will help all of the manufacturers which are the ones supplying the products to the European citizens on the European market. So the theory is that by doing this we’re able to help them make meet their obligations. And then as we’re engaged with upstream projects, some of these projects might not have a steward or a Big Brother or a Big Sister to help. Part of our mission is to as we discover these projects that either have retired, they might not be operating upstream, they could be end of support or they might need help will be part of the cert’s mission will be to try to find stewards to help support these projects long term. And that’s where again it does not directly help an organization kind of achieve their compliance needs for the law. But in theory we’re able to get data out there more quickly so that those organizations can be more responsive. And then as they have capabilities, we’re trying to encourage those members to step up and become stewards and provide that more long term sustainability for these projects.

Swapnil Bhartiya: What kind of involvement engagement you are seeing. You also have LF Europe now as well. You also have Linux Foundation India as well. Talk a bit about what kind of engagement are you looking at from global perspective.

CRob: So from our perspective, Open source is truly a global international effort. You’ll have people contribute from every location on the planet. So to serve just one jurisdiction does not help because very rarely are projects kind of defined within a particular geography. And so our goal is to try to be this neutral international body to help the open source. And very broadly we’ve had great conversations with international governments. We’re in conversations with the US Government and like their Gold Eagle project, and we’ve been longtime partners and contributors with CISA and NIST and, and mitre. So that is again part of what we’re doing. But through our work with the cra, I have excellent engagement with my friends at ANISA and the European Commission. And you know, those are stakeholders that we’ve been briefing about the project. And you know, we feel that as these issues go public, we want to make sure that that information is shared at a global scale and not restricted to a particular geography. And we’re also in conversations with our friends, like for MEDI in Japan, talking with folks in India, Korea, Australia, uk. So we were thinking the program is designed to be as international and globally cooperative as possible and my team will be an international team. I’ve already got folks from several different nationalities participating and that’s kind of our goal, is that eventually, when the team is in full operation, I have kind of a global follow the sun approach where I’ll have experts in many different geographies that’ll be available to assist, depending on what the particular issue arises.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Once again, thank you so much for joining us and walking us through what this project is all about. And of course, those who are watching, please head over to acrithys.org and check out the greatest work and please get involved. That’s the only way open source works. Thanks for your time again and I will see you in the next one.