Leadership

Governing Board Chair

Nelly Porter

Nelly Porter is a lead of the Confidential Computing in Google with over 10 years’ experience in platform security, virtsec, PKI, crypto, authentication, and authorization field. She is working on multiple areas in Google, from root of trust, Titan, to the Shielded and Confidential Computing, has 25 patents and defensive publications. Prior to working at Google, Porter spent some time working in Microsoft in the virtualization and security space, HP Labs advancing clustering story, and Scientix (Israel) as a firmware and kernel driver eng. She has two sons, both are in the CS field, one of them is working for Google.

Vice Chair of the Governing Board

Emily Fox

Emily Fox is a DevOps enthusiast, security unicorn, and advocate for Women in Technology. She promotes the cross-pollination of development and security practices. She has worked in security for over 13 years to drive a cultural change where security is unobstructive, natural, and accessible to everyone. Her technical interests include containerization, least privilege, automation, and promoting women in technology. She holds a BS in Information Systems and an MS in cybersecurity. Serving as chair on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) and co-chair for KubeCon+CloudNativeCon China 2021, Europe 2022, North America 2022, Europe 2023, and CloudNativeSecurityCon 2023, she is involved in a variety of open source communities and activities.

Premier Member Representative to the Governing Board

Marc Meunier

Marc leads Ecosystem Development projects at Arm as part of the Infrastructure Line of Business. Marc is part of the Ecosystem Development team at Arm, leading projects with partners in the field of security and networking.  Marc is involved in a number of Linux Foundation projects including Parsec and Project Magma.  He is representing Arm on the governing board as well as the outreach committee of the Confidential Computing Consortium.

Premier Member Representative to the Governing Board

Peixin Hou

Peixin Hou is currently serving as the Chief Architect of Open Software and Systems in the Central Software Institute, Huawei. He has been working in the software industry for over 20 years and has experience in operating systems, mobile software, media processing, and cloud computing.

Peixin started his open source journey in 2000 and is now an active strategist and evangelist in the field. He is involved in defining various key strategies on open source for Huawei and leads the company’s FOSS development in areas such as Linux and containers. He also serves as a board or steering committee member in several open source projects, such as Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Core Infrastructure Initiative. Peixin has also represented Huawei on the board of Linaro.

Peixin received his Ph.D. from the University of Surrey, UK in electronic and electrical engineering.

Premier Member Representative To The Governing Board

Shankaran Gnanashanmugam

Shankaran is a technical lead manager for Network Platform Security at Meta leading efforts on Confidential Computing and platform Security. He has developed a platform for confidential computing and is also working on multiple areas from Platform root of trust, Intrusion Detection, to Anti-DDoS protection in Meta. Shankaran has over 15 years of experience in security. Prior to Meta, Shankaran worked at Netskope and Juniper Networks. At Netskope, he was the architect for deep application packet inspection engine powering inline CASB and worked on multiple data plane solutions from Data Leakage Prevention to Network Security. He has worked on SSL VPN and Mobile Security at Juniper Networks.

Premier Member Representative To The Governing Board

Stephen Walli

Stephen is a principal program manager working in the Azure team at Microsoft and leads the Governing Board for the Confidential Computing Consortium. Prior to that he was a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Stephen has been a technical executive, a founder, a writer, a systems developer, a software construction geek, and a standards diplomat. He has worked in the IT industry since 1980 as both customer and vendor, working with open source for 25 years. He blogs about open source and software business at “Once More unto the Breach”, opensource.com, and on Medium.

Premier Member Representative To The Governing Board

Vini Jaiswal

Vini Jaiswal is a recognized expert in AI and Data, acclaimed for her significant contributions to Apache Spark, MLflow, Privacy Innovation and, notably, Delta Lake. As the Chair of the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) at the Linux Foundation Data and AI, a Governing Board member for both Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC) and LF AI and Data, and a key contributor to the open-source initiatives at Grace Hopper (Anitab.org), Vini plays a crucial role in driving technological innovation, empowering developers, and shaping the future of data and AI. With over 13 years of experience in scalable application development and production implementation at TikTok, Databricks, and Citigroup, Vini has successfully built solutions and diverse AI use cases working with over 100 companies. As a leading community voice and trusted advisor, Vini actively contributes through her advisory roles, participation in conferences, sharing educational content, and collaborations with international organizations and academic institutions.

General Member’s Representative to the Governing Board

Samuel Ortiz

Samuel is a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Rivos, where he works on defining and implementing Confidential Computing and trusted IO on RISC-V platforms. He’s been working in the software industry for more than 15 years, and has experience with operating systems, virtualization, container technologies and cloud computing. Prior to joining Rivos, he worked for Nokia, Intel and Apple.

Samuel is a long time open source contributor and maintainer. He co-created and still maintains multiple open source projects like e.g. Kata Containers, Cloud Hypervisor or Confidential Containers.

General Member’s Representative to the Governing Board

Manu Fontaine

Manu Fontaine is the Founder and CEO of Hushmesh, a dual-use Public Benefit cybersecurity startup in the Washington DC area. The company believes that people, companies and democracies need safe and authentic data, just like they need clean water and stable electricity. To achieve this, Hushmesh leverages Confidential Computing to automate decentralized, pairwise, and end-to-end cryptographic security, at the person and non-person entity level and at global scale. Secured by the Universal Name System (UNS) and the Universal Certificate Authority (UCA), the Mesh provides global assurance of data provenance, integrity, authenticity, confidentiality and privacy for all entities. Manu lives with his wife in Northern Virginia, and is the proud father of two daughters pursuing electrical engineering and physics career paths.

General Member’s Representative to the Governing Board

Chris Ramming

Chris Ramming is a research director with a passion for bridging theory and practice. He joined VMware to help drive organic innovation and is responsible for the VMware academic research program as well as an incubator that explores disruptive technologies to create new revenue streams for the company. He serves on the CRA Board and is a member of the CRA-Industry steering group; he serves on the DARPA ISAT steering committee and is a former chair; he is also past chair and board member of the UIDP. He has worked with/for several leading research organizations including Intel Labs, DARPA, AT&T Research, and Bell Labs.

Premier Member Representative To The Governing Board

Michael O’Connor

Michael O’Connor is a system software architect and senior director of software architecture at NVIDIA. Michael is the chief architect for Confidential Computing at NVIDIA and is also leading software architecture for NVIDIA AI Enterprise and NVIDIA Certified.  Prior to working in Confidential Computing, Michael led the open-source contribution efforts from NVIDIA for GPU optimizations in Deep Learning Frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, MXNet, and Caffe.

Vice President of Engineering and Head of Product Security at AMD

Hugo Romero

Hugo Romero is a Vice President of Engineering and Head of Product Security at AMD. He oversees several key areas of Security Architecture, including Confidential Computing Architecture and Root of Trust Architecture. With extensive experience in both hardware and software security, Hugo brings a comprehensive expertise to his role. Prior to joining AMD, he spent 24 years at Qualcomm, where he honed his skills and contributed to numerous security innovations.

Governing Board Representative

Anand Pashupathy

Anand Pashupathy is Vice President and General Manager of Security Software & Services
(S3) Division in the Software and Advanced Technology Group where he leads a team of senior
leaders to deliver security software technologies and services that activate and differentiate
silicon security features, and cultivate a high standard of security, operational & cultural
excellence. Anand is also responsible for Intel’s Confidential Compute vision, strategy, and
execution. Previously Anand has held many engineering, program wide and GM leadership
roles at Intel. Additionally, Anand has been granted six patents.
Anand is a strong advocate for women and underrepresented people in technology, he serves
as the Executive Sponsor for an internal employee resource group. For his advocacy and
leadership contributions to diversity and inclusion, Anand received the 2023 Global Diversity
and Inclusion Achievement Award for Executive Advocate for D&I. Outside of work, Anand and
his family love to travel and experience cultures from around the world. He earned his MBA from
the Kellogg School of Management, and a Master’s degree in Computer Science and has been
with Intel since the nineties.

General Member’s Representative to the Governing Board

Mark Medum Bundgaard

Mark is a Computer Scientist from Aarhus University, Denmark. He has extensive experience in cloud-native architecture, infrastructure as code, and blockchain architecture. His work has had a huge impact on products used today in industries such as fintech, IoT, and Telco. 

In his previous positions, he operated on various projects at TDC NET, Cloud-compliance solutions for Danske Bank, Managed product development for a real-time recommendation engine for Jyllands-Posten, and Toit creating the first secure IoT platform.

Technical Advisory Council Chair

Dan Middleton

Dan Middleton is a Principal Engineer with over 20 years at intel. He has been privileged to develop and release products in emerging areas including Services, SaaS, Computational Imaging, Blockchain, and Confidential Computing. Dan has a track record of leadership in the open-source ecosystem. He has represented Intel in other Linux Foundation projects including Hyperledger, CNCF CoCo, and the Open Source Security Foundation.

Director of Open Source Ecosystem

Zhipeng (Howard) Huang

Zhipeng Huang currently serve as Director of Open Source Ecosystem for Huawei Compute productline. Zhipeng is now the TAC member of LFAI, TAC and Outreach member of the Confidential Computing Consortium, co-lead of the Kubernetes Policy WG, project lead of CNCF Security SIG, founder of the OpenStack Cyborg project. Zhipeng is also leading a team in Huawei that works on ONNX, Kubeflow, Akraino, and other open source communities.

Nathaniel McCallum

Program manager

Alec Fernandez

Alec spent several decades in application development working with SAS Institute, a pioneering data analytics software company.  As security became more important, he pivoted to a role as an an application security architect focusing on PKI infrastructure needed to secure data at rest and data in motion.

Nagging doubts about uncontrollable access to data in memory led Alec to his his current role in Confidential Computing acting as a program manager in Microsoft Azure.  He helps define and drive features to improve the security posture of Confidential Computing products that prevent unauthorized individuals, including Microsoft operators, from being able to access customer data whether it is at rest, in motion or in use.

Senior Security Architect

Fritz Alder

FFritz Alder is a Senior Security Architect for confidential computing at NVIDIA. He holds a PhD in confidential computing from KU Leuven, Belgium, and has broad research experience on trusted execution environments including software and interface attacks on enclaves, designing and architecting secure hardware additions, and integrating confidential computing in the cloud. He is one of the organizers of the FOSDEM devroom on confidential computing.

Research Scientist

Mingshen Sun

Mingshen is a research scientist at TikTok, leading applications and innovations of the trusted/confidential computing technologies. Previously, Mingshen worked on multiple open-source projects in security with trusted execution environments. In particular, he was fortunate to lead Apache Teaclave. Mingshen also published several academic papers on topics at the intersection of privacy and security, operating systems, and programming languages. Mingshen has two fluffy cats that keep playing hide and seek around the home all day.

Senior Fellow at AMD

David Kaplan

David Kaplan is a Senior Fellow at AMD and is the lead architect for the AMD confidential computing features, which he has worked on for over 10 years.  David has almost 18 years of experience at AMD in the areas of hardware security and CPU design.  He has filed over 50 patents in his career and has a B.S. from the University of Illinois.

Technical Advisory Council Vice Chair

Yash Mankad

Yash is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, where he is currently focused on productizing confidential computing technologies in RHEL and Red Hat OpenShift. Previously, Yash has been an active contributor to several open source projects related to Virtualization technologies including KVM userspace components like QEMU and libvirt, and has been a member of the CentOS Virt SIG.

Technical Advisory Council Chair

Dan Middleton

Dan Middleton is a Principal Engineer with over 20 years at intel. He has been privileged to develop and release products in emerging areas including Services, SaaS, Computational Imaging, Blockchain, and Confidential Computing. Dan has a track record of leadership in the open-source ecosystem. He has represented Intel in other Linux Foundation projects including Hyperledger, CNCF CoCo, and the Open Source Security Foundation.

Outreach Committee Chair

Kate George

Kate leads Security Researcher and Industry Engagement at Intel. She has established her career in various sectors including startup, tech, cybersecurity, events, and marketing. Kate has a keen eye for emerging trends, she has expertise in driving brand awareness, optimizing campaigns, leveraging data analytics, and building strategy that has accelerated business growth. In addition to her professional accomplishments, Kate is an avid problem solver who thrives in fast-paced environments. She is a dedicated advocate for community engagement and social responsibility to make a positive impact in the community.

General Member’s Representative to the Governing Board

Mark Medum Bundgaard

Mark is a Computer Scientist from Aarhus University, Denmark. He has extensive experience in cloud-native architecture, infrastructure as code, and blockchain architecture. His work has had a huge impact on products used today in industries such as fintech, IoT, and Telco. 

In his previous positions, he operated on various projects at TDC NET, Cloud-compliance solutions for Danske Bank, Managed product development for a real-time recommendation engine for Jyllands-Posten, and Toit creating the first secure IoT platform.

General Member’s Representative to the Governing Board

Mike Bursell

Mike Bursell is the Executive Director of the Confidential Computing
Consortium. He is one of the co-founders of the Enarx project
(https://enarx.dev), and was CEO and co-founder of Profian, a start-up
based on Enarx.  He has previously served on the Governing Boards of
the CCC and the Bytecode Alliance and currently holds advisory board
roles with various start-ups.  Previous companies include Red Hat,
Intel and Citrix, with roles in security, virtualisation and
networking. After training in software engineering, he specialised in
distributed systems and security. He regularly speaks at industry
events in Europe, North America and APAC.

Professional interests include: Confidential Computing, WebAssembly,
Linux, trust, open source software, security, distributed systems,
blockchain, virtualisation.

Mike has an MA from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from the
Open University, and is author of “Trust in Computer Systems and the
Cloud”, published by Wiley.  He holds over 100 patents and previously
served on the Red Hat patent review committee.

Technical Community Architect

Sal Kimmich

Sal Kimmich has over a decade of expertise in computational architecture and cybersecurity.They started their career sharing Python scripts with other computational neuroscientists in the wild world of supercomputing. A decade later, they are still paying attention to the algorithmic side of open source tech. Before joining CCC, Sal worked as a scalable SecDevOps Machine Learning engineer and brought those contributions to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). They have focused on practical automation around security best practices that make the maintainer’s lives easier, like Security Slams .  Sal’s aims to make maintainers’ work rewarding, to create tech demos that dazzle, and to showcase the world-class Open Source Projects enabling secure computation.

Governing Board Representative

Anand Pashupathy

Anand Pashupathy is Vice President and General Manager of Security Software & Services
(S3) Division in the Software and Advanced Technology Group where he leads a team of senior
leaders to deliver security software technologies and services that activate and differentiate
silicon security features, and cultivate a high standard of security, operational & cultural
excellence. Anand is also responsible for Intel’s Confidential Compute vision, strategy, and
execution. Previously Anand has held many engineering, program wide and GM leadership
roles at Intel. Additionally, Anand has been granted six patents.
Anand is a strong advocate for women and underrepresented people in technology, he serves
as the Executive Sponsor for an internal employee resource group. For his advocacy and
leadership contributions to diversity and inclusion, Anand received the 2023 Global Diversity
and Inclusion Achievement Award for Executive Advocate for D&I. Outside of work, Anand and
his family love to travel and experience cultures from around the world. He earned his MBA from
the Kellogg School of Management, and a Master’s degree in Computer Science and has been
with Intel since the nineties.