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Possible security initiatives and things we've discussed doing as part of the work before, during, and after the January 13th 2022 meeting at the White House. 

Note this is a brainstorming document.  Items can be added by anyone without any expectation they are plausible or will become work we do or policy we produce.  They are in no particular order.

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Theme: Developer Education

• Require a minimum of 3 PPMC members to have attended a (yet to be written) training course on Vulnerability handling at the ASF before the podling is allowed to graduate
• Require projects to maintain a security team of at least 3 people all of whom have undertaken the training described in the previous point
• Is OpenSSF training something we should promote to committers
• Educate projects on the selection of dependencies, and their upkeep (see also "Help users pick secure projects") (This could possibly be OpenSSF Scorecards)
• Write up how the ASF acts as a Curator of OSS (in terms of the curation discussions happening) and what curation functions are performed

Theme: Improving our process and policy

• Have a better EOL policy with defined communication routes, policy for CVE in EOL releases.
• Look again into SCR:CLR as a service to projects
•   See also this thread about Attic 
• Have a policy around projects that depend on other EOL projects (ASF and non-ASF)
• More 2FA requirements
• Consider if projects that are not releasing regularly are really healthy.  Could they realistically respond to a security vulnerability in a reasonable time frame?More 2FA requirements
• Make sure we upgrade our CNA CVE process to JSON 5.0 to make use of the additional record data
  Get involved with various OpenSSF initiatives
  • We probably ought to fix every CVE entry so the version_data works well for 5.0, see for example https://vulnogram.github.io/seaview/?CVE-2021-44549 
  • Would OpenSSF sigstore be a future replacement for current signing policies.  See also mail from GOSST
  • Should have more complete policy around production of "builds" https://www.apache.org/legal/release-policy.html#compiled-packages
  • Look at OpenSSF AllStar
  • Give more guidance on how to deal with 'low severity' issues to avoid them 'hanging around' and distracting from more urgent things

  WH Theme: Preventing Defects

  • Make sure our projects are keeping track of their dependencies, especially things that are EOL, especially things that are other Apache projects and EOL (example log4j v1)
    • Track the dependencies across our projects so we can see the combined-graph for the latest version of each ASF project. Work centrally to encourage that dependencies are not insecure, or excessively dated.
  • Facilitate direct funding efforts such as TideLift which provide direct financial support for developers to focus on matters such as security
  • How does OpenSSF Alpha and/or Omega fit with ASF
  • Look at the sponsored SOS rewards program
  • Think about which ASF projects would benefit from being covered by IBB (they reached out to us to expand our current set)
  • Looks at OpenSSF OSS Fuzz (high false positive rate - would benefit from manual triage by OSS Fuzz team before notifications are sent to maintainers). See also mail from GOSST. 

  WH Theme: Identify Critical projects / Help users pick secure projects

  • How can we make the OpenSSF critical projects list better for ASF projects
  • Make sure our users know what they should be doing to find out about updates, EOL, CVEsIs the training something we should promote to committers
  • How can we make the OpenSSF scorecard better for ASF projects
    • for example https://metrics.openssf.org/grafana/d/default/metric-dashboard?orgId=1&var-PackageURL=pkg%3Agithub/apache/logging-log4j2 which is unable to figure out many things and is wrong on others (like 'signed releases' and so on).
    • How can we make the critical projects list better for ASF projects
    • How does Alpha and/or Omega fit with ASF
    • Would sigstore be a future replacement for current signing policies
    • Look at SLSA/SBOM work
  • Minimize situations in which PMCs refuse contributions for anything other than strong technical reasons
    • Forking increases the attack area and complexity of fixes - projects should be governed such that the need to fork when using the code is minimized
    • Stop accepting forks as a necessary and acceptable outcome of PMC control of ASF projects - users cannot be expected to invest in a community if the gates to the PMC are closed
    • Focus on education such that PMCs can enable "constructive forking" in a controlled manner such that the forking community are supported in improving a projects architecture to minimize the need to fork
    • Educate ASF projects that the way to a healthy community is through the production of reusable components that enable contributions designed to enhance reuse in broader contexts so as to allow the pool of contributors to grow
    • Re-Affirm that ASF Projects are successful when the broadest possible community is engaged leading to more maintainers and more eyeballs on the shared code
  • Consider annual re-affirmation by PMCs towards Apache Way, with reminders of What It Is.Consider ASF Blog Post: "How You Can Help" directed towards corporate users .
  • Should have more complete policy around production of "builds" https://www.apache.org/legal/release-policy.html#compiled-packages
  • Spend Foundation resources (money) on creating messaging for community members, e.g.
  • Popularizing, re-affirming The Apache Way
  Messaging to evangelize a "give back" culture among consumers
  • Presentations for community members to share with Colleagues on how to give back, how to handle Open Source contributions
  • Language for corporate lawyers to facilitate contributions by developers in their organization, what it means when a developer signs an ICLA (or is hired already having one on file), etc. 
  )

  WH Theme: SBOMS /  Notifications

  • See SBOM page
  • Look at providing vulnerability data in a format that can be combined with SBOM such as VEX (CSAF) and/or OSV  https://osv.dev/
  • Look at EOL notifications CSAF as an example https://access.redhat.com/security/data/csaf/beta/2019/rhsa-2019_1862.json
  • We have no way to know who is using our projects, nor do we want to capture that data (so is the current vulnerability notification system sufficient?)

  Completed

  • Look again into SCR:CLR as a service to projects. Done. Rejected for various reasons.
  • Sometimes communication with vulnerability reporters breaks down, is it time to have a more structured tool for handling reports which forces the process? or is it more people engagement? or can we just require checkboxes before allocating CVE names in our existing tool?
    • From September 2022 we have a dedicated person paid by ASF to perform vulnerability handling functions
  • In July 2022 we implemented automated checks (INFRA-23459) to ensure packages contained the right signatures and met policy
  • Facilitate direct funding efforts such as TideLift which provide direct financial support for developers to focus on matters such as security
  • Consider adopting https://osv.dev/ instead of CVE/CVSS.
  • Require a minimum of 3 PPMC members to have attended a (yet to be written) training course on Vulnerability handling at the ASF before the podling is allowed to graduate
  • Require projects to maintain a security team of at least 3 people all of whom have undertaken the training described in the previous point