Leadership

Governing Board Chair

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.

Governing Board Vice-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 Chair

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.

Governing Board Vice-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.

General Member’s Representative to the Governing Board

Eric Voit

Eric Voit is a Principal Engineer within Cisco’s Enterprise Group. Throughout his 30+ year career in the networking industry Eric has developed, standardized, and driven new technologies to market. These include event-based network Telemetry, architectures for Carrier Ethernet, remote access to VPNs, PPPoE for Broadband, and the first VoIP offering by a major U.S. local telephone carrier. Eric has 100+ US and International patents / patents pending and five IETF RFCs. Eric also runs a Cisco internal venture capital fund.

Premier Member Representative To The Governing Board

Kimberly Craven

Kimberly Craven is the Senior Director of the Open Source Program Office at Red Hat, where she leads a team of experts focused on building and supporting communities around open source technologies. With over two decades of experience in open source, she has become a seasoned leader in the field of open source software and community engagement.

Kimberly began her journey in open source in 1999 and has since worked with a wide range of communities, including those focused on development tools, databases, middleware, operating systems, containers, and cloud technologies. In her current role at Red Hat, Kimberly is responsible for driving the company’s open source engagement strategy. She is is passionate about helping others get involved in open source and find ways to contribute to the community.

With a career that spans start-ups and Fortune 500 organizations, Kimberly has held positions in technical sales, support engineering, product management, and product marketing. During her tenure at Red Hat, she has used her collaborative management style to roll out major product launches for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and establish Red Hat’s role as a leader in the containers space.

When she’s not leading open source initiatives, Kimberly can be found skiing and hiking with her family in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. She is a true believer in the power of open source to drive positive change and is passionate about helping others get involved in the community.

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

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

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.

End-User Advisory Council Chair and General Member’s Representative to the Governing Board

Richard Searle

Richard is the Vice President of Confidential Computing at Fortanix and currently the Chair of the End-User Advisory Council as well as General Member’s Representative to the Governing Board of the Confidential Computing Consortium. He gained a Doctorate in Business Administration from Henley Business School by developing a formal mathematical model of perceptual change and has had an extensive career in systems engineering, with recent projects in the field of natural language processing and computational propaganda. By leveraging the integrity and confidentiality guarantees offered by Intel® SGX; Richard is currently working with Fortanix’ customers to enable secure applications deployment, multi-party computation and data analytics, at scale, using private and public cloud infrastructures.

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.

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.

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

Nick Vidal

Nick Vidal is Community Manager at Enarx/Profian and Outreach Chair at the Confidential Computing Consortium from the Linux Foundation. Previously, he was the Director of Community and Business Development at the Open Source Initiative and Director of Americas at the Open Invention Network.

Outreach Committee Vice 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.

End-User Advisory Council Chair and General Member’s Representative to the Governing Board

Richard Searle

Richard is the Vice President of Confidential Computing at Fortanix and currently the Chair of the End-User Advisory Council as well as General Member’s Representative to the Governing Board of the Confidential Computing Consortium. He gained a Doctorate in Business Administration from Henley Business School by developing a formal mathematical model of perceptual change and has had an extensive career in systems engineering, with recent projects in the field of natural language processing and computational propaganda. By leveraging the integrity and confidentiality guarantees offered by Intel® SGX; Richard is currently working with Fortanix’ customers to enable secure applications deployment, multi-party computation and data analytics, at scale, using private and public cloud infrastructures.

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.

Senior Program Manager

Kurt Taylor

Kurt Taylor is a Senior Program Manager working for the CCC. Kurt is a seasoned technical leader with proven experience in open source community building and leading global software development teams.