Nominee: Khushi Chhillar

Statement

I am nominating myself for the Board Advisory Council (BAC) of the OpenSSL Foundation, representing both the academic sector, with a particular focus on advocating for women and underrepresented groups in open source security.

I am currently a university student actively engaged with OpenSSL through practical implementation, teaching, and community building. As well I am part of NgKore open source community leading the path towards the opensource with our contribution .

I totally understand the challenges faced by students and newcomers trying to break into open source security, and I am committed to lowering these barriers.understand firsthand what students struggle with when learning OpenSSL and cryptography. I can help shape documentation, tutorials, and educational resources that actually resonate with learners.
I can facilitate stronger connections between universities and the OpenSSL project, encouraging more academic adoption, research contributions, and student involvement.

Honestly speaking, I know I lack the industrial experience that many BAC members might have, but that's exactly why my perspective matters. I represent the students, the beginners, the women who are afraid to take that first step, and the communities in countries like India where access to such opportunities is limited.I wholeheartedly believe in OpenSSL's mission that "all our communities are important" and that privacy and security are fundamental rights for everyone.

The BAC needs voices that understand what it's like to start from scratch, to navigate open source without a corporate safety net, and to fight for representation in spaces that often feel unwelcoming. I bring empathy, ground-level experience, and an unwavering commitment to building a more diverse and accessible OpenSSL community.

And I genuinely believe that if my presence on the BAC can inspire even 1 percent of the community especially women and students to see themselves as legitimate contributors to OpenSSL, then I will have succeeded in giving something valuable back to the project that has given so much to all of us.

Nominee: Nikolas Gauder

Statement

As a Master's student in Informatics at the Technical University of Munich, focusing on IT security, networking, and applied cryptography, I have worked with OpenSSL's QUIC stack in the past, contributed code, and was an OpenSSL Foundation scholarship recipient for the OpenSSL Conference 2025. I am eager to engage further with the community and give back by providing my experience and perspective to the Foundation Business Advisory Committee.

If selected for the FBAC, I plan to represent the perspectives of students as well as researchers who rely on OpenSSL for secure systems and experimental research. My goal is to contribute constructive feedback, advocate for the community's needs, and support the long-term sustainability of the OpenSSL project.

I believe I would be a valuable addition to the Foundation's BAC because I bring hands-on experience, a fresh early-career perspective, and a strong commitment to bridging the gap between academic research, open-source development, and industry adoption.

Nominee: Shubham Kumar

Statement

Shubham Kumar is the Co-Founder of NgKore, India’s first open-source community focused on PQC and eBPF, and also a mentor within the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust (LFDT). His background is in network security and telecom, where he has spent the last few years working on how PQC can be integrated into next-generation systems. Along the way, he has authored technical reports, whitepapers, and patents on PQC migration strategies for different networks.

His journey with OpenSSL started long before he even realized it — back when he was tinkering on his first Ubuntu laptop. Since then, it has become a core part of his work. These days, he builds and tests PQC-enabled versions of internet protocols, and he has also had the chance to present his work on protocol migration using OpenSSL at the OpenSSL Conference, 2025 (which is one of his sources of motivation to join the BAC).

If elected to represent the academic community on the BAC, he would like to focus on bringing every individual perspective into the Foundation’s strategic and technical roadmap. His goal is to ensure that decisions regarding OpenSSL’s direction reflect not only the needs of the industry but also the research and education community, which often pioneers new cryptographic ideas. He also wants to encourage more collaboration and engagement between universities, research labs, and open-source contributors so that innovation in cryptography doesn’t stay on paper—it reaches the people who build and secure the internet every day.