OpenSSL Communities
Thu 5 Dec 2024 12:14PM

Foundation BAC: Election for Academics’ Delegate

EC Election Committee Public Seen by 23

Select the Academics’ Delegate for the Business Advisory Committee (BAC) of the OpenSSL Foundation. This advisory is important in enhancing our governance structure, ensuring that decisions reflect the diverse stakeholders involved and that our Mission and Values remain aligned with the community’s needs.

Each individual has a single vote. Your participation is essential in shaping OpenSSL’s future and ensuring that the voice of the academics is effectively represented.

EC

Poll Created Thu 5 Dec 2024 12:15PM

Foundation BAC Academics' Election Closed Sun 15 Dec 2024 11:00PM

Outcome
by Election Committee Mon 16 Dec 2024 10:10AM

Thank you to everyone who participated in the recent election. We’re pleased to announce that Nicola Tuveri has been elected to an Academics seat in the OpenSSL Foundation BAC.

Congratulations to Nicola!

Results

Results Option % of points Voters
Nicola Tuveri - Tampere University 71.4% 5  
Billy Bob Brumley - RIT 28.6% 2  
None of the Above 0.0% 0  
Undecided 0% 10  

7 of 17 people have participated (41%)

EC

Election Committee Thu 5 Dec 2024 12:16PM

Nominee: Billy Bob Brumley

Statement

I made my first contribution to OpenSSL around 2008 when I was a young, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed PhD student. Since that time, as an academic I’ve used OpenSSL as a basis for the vast majority of my research. Over the years, I’ve discovered and (responsibly) disclosed quite a few vulnerabilities in OpenSSL, most of which have CVEs assigned (grep around in CHANGES.md).

What separates me from most other academics who use OpenSSL in their research is, I typically contribute software patches for fixes myself, not just point out problems. I’ve also helped with API and functionality issues, particularly in the EC module. I also enjoy contributing to unit and regression testing, either porting public test cases to OpenSSL or designing my own, both positive and negative tests. For an academic, I consider myself pretty active on OpenSSL’s GitHub, submitting my own PRs and/or participating in discussions.

At RIT, I run a course called “Open Source Software Security” which I built on OpenSSL. My students are required to submit PRs to the project, and some of them even get merged :D

I feel like my current roles at RIT position me nicely to serve on the BAC. My leadership role in RIT’s GCI entails plenty of committee-based decision making, which is in fact quite abundant throughout academia at large. Topically, I bring not only my own state-of-the-art expertise in my academic discipline, but also exposure to RIT’s significantly broader academic community, packed with far more talented scholars than myself.

In summary, I’d be honored to serve on the BAC, allowing me to continue to contribute to OpenSSL, yet in a more formal way!

EC

Election Committee Thu 5 Dec 2024 12:17PM

Nominee: Nicola Tuveri

Statement

A Researcher at Tampere University (Finland), I contributed to OpenSSL for the first time in 2010, later I had the honor of becoming an OpenSSL Committer and I have been serving in the OpenSSL Technical Committee since 2019.

My research specializes in software and micro architecture side-channel analysis and the integration of modern cryptosystems (lately mainly PQC) in mainstream libraries such as OpenSSL.

If elected as a BAC representative for the Academic Community in the OpenSSL Foundation, I aim to help bringing the perspectives of the members of our community into the strategic planning of the new governance structure for the project.