Leadership

Governing Board Chair

Ron Perez

Ron Perez is an Intel Fellow and Chief Security Architect at Intel. In the Office of the Intel CTO, Ron also directly leads security architecture and pathfinding for Intel’s server and datacenter products and organizations with a primary focus on Confidential Computing.

Governing Board Vice 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.

Governing Board Chair

Ron Perez

Ron Perez is an Intel Fellow and Chief Security Architect at Intel. In the Office of the Intel CTO, Ron also directly leads security architecture and pathfinding for Intel’s server and datacenter products and organizations with a primary focus on Confidential Computing.

Governing Board Vice 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.

Premier Member Representative To 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.

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.

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.

Project Coordinator

Helen Lau

Helen Lau joined The Linux Foundation in March 2022 and works as a Project Coordinator for the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC) and RISC-V. Previously, Helen worked at the Practising Law Institute as a Senior Pro Bono Program & Membership Coordinator. In her spare time, Helen likes to lift weights in her home gym and aspires to return to powerlifting. Helen currently resides in Salt Lake City with her family.