Christopher Robinson
CRob Bio
Christopher Robinson (aka CRob) is the Director of Security Communications at Intel Product Assurance and Security. With 25 years of Enterprise-class engineering, architectural, operational and leadership experience, Chris has worked at several Fortune 500 companies with experience in the Financial, Medical, Legal, and Manufacturing verticals, and spent 6 years helping lead the Red Hat Product Security team as their Program Architect.
CRob has been a featured speaker at Gartner’s Identity and Access Management Summit, RSA, BlackHat, DefCon, Derbycon, the (ISC)2 World Congress, and was named a "Top Presenter" for the 2017 and 2018 Red Hat Summits. CRob was the President of the Cleveland (ISC)2 Chapter, and is also a children's Cybersecurity Educator with the (ISC)2 Safe-and-Secure program. He holds a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification, Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional (CSSLP) certification, and The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) certification. He is heavily involved in the Forum for Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) PSIRT SIG, collaborating in writing the FIRST PSIRT Services Framework, as well as the PSIRT Maturity Assessment framework. CRob is also the lead/facilitator of the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) Vulnerability Disclosures and OSS Developer Best Practices working groups.
He enjoys hats, herding cats, and moonlit walks on the beach.
Session
Open source software is incredibly powerful - and while that power is often used for good, it can be weaponized when open-source projects contain software security flaws that attackers can use to compromise those systems, or even the entire software supply chains that those systems are a part of. The Open Source Security Foundation is an open, cross-industry group aimed at improving the security of the open source ecosystem. In this presentation, members of the OpenSSF Vulnerability Disclosure working group will be sharing with open-source maintainers advice on how to handle when researchers disclose vulnerabilities in your project’s codebase - and we’ll also take any questions you have about this often mysterious topic!
Part 1 of this presentation will give an overview of the basics of Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) for open-source software maintainers, including some basics about security vulnerabilities, how to communicate securely and write patches without leaking vulnerability information, what you can expect during a disclosure with a researcher, and how to handle challenging scenarios like when you can’t patch, when a vulnerability is already being exploited by a threat actor in the wild, or when a vulnerability impacts many downstream dependencies.
Part 2 of this presentation will include a discussion about vulnerability disclosure best practices, pitfalls, and challenges. We will also welcome questions from the audience - ask us anything about dealing with vulnerabilities in open source!