Open source innovations in trust ecosystems

If you’re a hardware enthusiast like me, you’ve probably read articles about #Caliptra in recent years. I recently dove deep into it and found it to be a fascinating intersection of hardware, security, and open-source collaboration. We’re living in an era where AI threats to digital systems are becoming more sophisticated. So, the attackers are not just targeting software anymore, but every hardware as well. So, a group of giants—#AMD, #Google, #Microsoft, and others—got together and said: “Hey, the current Root of Trust (RoT) implementations are all proprietary black boxes. How do we know what’s happening under the hood? Why isn’t there a secure, auditable, and transparent way to implement trust at the silicon level?” That’s where Caliptra was born. A Root of Trust (Commonly known as #RoT), for those new to the term, is the foundational security component of a chip—it’s the first thing that boots up, verifies #firmware, and ensures that everything in the system is authentic and hasn’t been tampered with. But until Caliptra, RoTs were locked down, custom-built for different companies, and often couldn’t be inspected or verified externally. Caliptra changed the game. It’s the first #opensource, silicon-proven Root of Trust IP that’s been co-designed with transparency, auditability, and flexibility in mind. The entire goal? Build a trust anchor that’s vendor-agnostic and usable by anyone designing a chip—be it a #CPU, #GPU, #accelerator, or #SoC. Caliptra seamlessly integrates between hardware and firmware. It comes with: - A RISC-V core that executes secure boot and cryptographic operations. Embedded cryptographic engines for hashing, signing, and verifying firmware blobs. - A lightweight firmware layer, open-sourced and testable, that manages measurements and attestation. - And hooks into the host processor and system management components to ensure that before your OS or hypervisor boots, the system is verified and locked down. So instead of trusting a closed chip and praying it’s secure, now companies are verifying and customizing their trust foundation. As more companies adopt Caliptra, it’s fast becoming the gold standard in hardware-based security for the modern era. Whether it’s booting up a cloud server, authenticating a mobile device, or enabling trusted AI accelerators, Caliptra ensures that the first step is always a secure one—and we can all verify it ourselves. It’s a rare example of collaborative, open innovation in an area that's generally guarded and opaque which I found fascinating.

https://lnkd.in/ePhN_zzQ Reimagining Identity Security at Scale: Why the SailPoint Harbor Pilot Caught My Eye In today’s hybrid, multi-cloud environments, identity isn’t just the new perimeter—it’s the foundation of trust. As organizations push toward zero trust architectures, the need to scale identity governance with precision and flexibility becomes even more critical. That’s why I found the recent SailPoint Harbor Pilot project so compelling. Shared publicly in the SailPoint developer community, this open-source initiative reimagines how we handle identity security using a modular, containerized approach. Built with extensibility in mind, it’s a bold rethink of how to simplify deployment, speed up testing, and reduce infrastructure friction—particularly for teams tasked with managing complex enterprise identity programs. What impressed me most wasn’t just the technical execution—it was the mindset behind it. This wasn’t just code. It was a signal. A sign that we can and should push for practical, scalable solutions that reduce operational overhead and give security teams space to think strategically. We talk a lot about empowering talent to innovate. This is a great example of what happens when smart people are given the space and trust to build what should exist—not just maintain what already does. Kudos to the SailPoint community for embracing transparency and experimentation. And to the individual behind this effort—your work didn’t go unnoticed. If you’re in the identity space and haven’t checked out the Harbor Pilot project, it’s worth a look. Let’s keep encouraging open ideas, creative thinking, and scalable engineering—because that’s how we solve tomorrow’s identity problems today.

“Why are companies like OpenAI giving away their intellectual property?” Well, the short answer is: open source underpins all great technologies. This week, OpenAI released two versions of “GPT-OSS,” the company’s first open models in more than half a decade. These models can be run locally, giving developers more control over costs, privacy, and performance. And while this isn’t “open source” in the truest sense of the term, it’s a huge step in the right direction. It’s a big move, but it’s not a new idea. The most powerful tech innovations have been built on open source. Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, the list goes on… You don’t build a strong ecosystem by locking it behind an API. You build it by giving people the freedom to run and improve the technology themselves. That’s also how you drive real adoption, and that’s how you move the industry forward. I’ve said it many times before: the future is built on open source. I’ve founded my whole career on this belief, and I’ve developed and supported open source projects for almost 30 years. We made packet analysis accessible with Wireshark, we gave the world a detection engine with Falco, and we even delivered cloud system forensics this year with Stratoshark. Each of these projects has grown because of the people who have used them, extended them, and shared what they’ve learned. That’s not by accident. That’s the model. When it comes to cloud security, for instance, we shouldn’t be fighting an asymmetrical battle. Attackers are already collaborating. They’re trading tactics, sharing malware, and refining operations together. Defenders must do the same. Security is stronger when it’s collaborative. So is AI. So is innovation. What I’m saying is that open source isn’t just a licensing model. It’s a model for distribution, collaboration, and trust. It creates leverage for everyone – for builders, users, companies, and even countries – to shape the future on their terms. So that’s why OpenAI is “giving away IP.” Because when you build in the open, everyone wins. (And also because they know they will still have a huge market of users willing to pay for the premium tier, but my point still stands.)