Leadership
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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.
Premier Member Representative To The Governing Board
Vini Jaiswal
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.
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.
Staff Software Engineer
Cfir Cohen
research on Google’s virtualization stack, and led joint collaborations with CPU vendors and Google Project Zero on Confidential Computing security. Cfir is based in Seattle, WA with a family of two plus a one hundred pound German Shepherd.
Senior Software Engineer
Lily Sturmann
Lily Sturmann is a senior software engineer at Red Hat in the Office of the CTO’s Emerging Technologies Security team. She has primarily worked on security projects related to remote attestation and confidential computing, and more recently on securing the software supply chain. She has spoken at numerous local and regional events on these topics, as well as at Grace Hopper on using git as a core skill for contributing to open source. Her favorite language is Rust.
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.
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.
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.