Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2026

In 2025, the open source supply chain faced a record-breaking escalation in targeted attacks. This talk breaks down the latest research on how attackers exploit the "trust gap" in maintainer workflows, package repositories, and automated publishing pipelines.

Moving beyond the headlines, this session examines the abuse of repository-native features and the rise of dependency compromises. Participants will walk away with a clear understanding of the evolving threat landscape and the defensive strategies—like reproducible builds and continuous validation—essential for modern software resilience. Join us to learn how to maintain the velocity of open source development while building a foundation of verified trust.

Signed software creates assurances around the integrity and authenticity of how it was produced and by whom. But signing alone is not inherently valuable. The ability to verify the signature in a meaningful way elevates the process to complete the trust cycle.

Blend this idea with many disparate signing mechanisms, add the many layers of exchange as software changes hands and where the software ultimately needs to resolve verification, combine it with many different types of artifacts, and you end up with a complex web of requirements that can be difficult to maintain.

Zarf, an OpenSSF Sandbox project, takes a different approach. Rather than requiring each artifact to be independently verified against external infrastructure, Zarf consolidates artifacts into a declarative package that is pre-verified at creation time. A single signature covers the entire package. The trusted root is embedded in the CLI and the package contains the signature, enabling meaningful verification anywhere, including entirely airgapped environments, with no external connectivity or additional tooling required.

This presentation introduces "Alcoholless" Homebrew, which protects macOS hosts from potential malicious Homebrew packages by running Homebrew with a separate user account. A command running with this tool is only allowed to read and write its current directory.

While Alcoholless puts focus on Homebrew, it is also applicable to other package managers such as `pip install`, `npm install`, and `go install`. Aside from package management, it is even useful for running AI coding agents that may potentially execute harmful commands.

Alcoholless is also an attempt to reexamine the necessity of Linux-style containers that emerged in this century. It just utilizes 1990s' commands (`su`, `sudo`, `rsync`) and the macOS equivalent of `useradd` to implement container-like environments, without extending the XNU kernel to support Linux-style container syscalls.

Repository: https://github.com/AkihiroSuda/alcless

It's common practice to include the Git commit hash in a container image label to serve as a reference, but are you using container labels (and artifact metadata) to their full potential? By embedding metadata into your artifacts you expand your GitOps capabilities. Implement a simple build-cache-like mechanism when building your artifacts, generate robust changelogs across your multi-repo product, or provide better transparency to your security team for their audits and reports. It's even possible to perform Git Bisect-like problem determination between built images. While this talk will explore real-world examples using container images as portable sources of truth, these concepts can be applied anywhere it's possible to add additional metadata to built artifacts.

Most Linux distributions trust individual maintainers with complete package control, creating critical supply chain vulnerabilities. StageX rebuilds this trust model from scratch with a radically different approach: no single person or computer can compromise the system.
StageX requires fully bit-for-bit reproducible builds verified and signed by multiple independent parties before release. Built from 181 bytes of machine code, StageX bootstraps modern toolchains that can be used in container-native and static contexts.
This talk demonstrates StageX's approach to full-source bootstrapping, bit-for-bit reproducibility and multi-party verification; contrasts it with other reproducible build efforts like NixOS/Guix, and shows how its container-native design provides practical security guarantees. You'll learn how to implement these approaches in your own infrastructure to build software from toolchain to deployment.

Building custom Linux images for edge deployments requires distribution-specific toolchains, manual dependency resolution, and bespoke scripting; resulting in fragile, hard-to-reproduce pipelines.

Image Composer Tool (ICT) is an open-source tool that composes bootable Linux images from pre-built packages using declarative YAML templates. It supports Azure Linux, Ubuntu, Wind River eLxr, and Edge Microvisor Toolkit through a single workflow, with dependency resolution across RPM and DEB ecosystems, GPG signature verification, and deterministic builds for CI/CD.

This session covers:

Package management abstraction across RPM and DEB via a unified interface

Reproducible, template-driven builds producing identical outputs from identical inputs

Supply chain security: GPG verification, TLS-secured fetches, minimal attack surface

Extensible provider architecture enabling contributors to add new distributions

Live demo: composing a bootable image from a YAML template in minutes

Attendees will learn how declarative image composition simplifies multi-distribution package management and produces reproducible, secure OS images

Cloudflare’s global network relies on Debian Linux machines across 330+ cities. To enhance production security we wanted to ensure that our servers can only run authorized software. For this we leverage Linux Kernel's IMA-Measurement to validate binary signatures before execution. Our system encompasses first-party software, Docker containers, and open-source Debian packages.

This talk illustrates how we successfully injected digital signatures into every Debian package installed on our fleet. This involved deep dives into the Linux Kernel, modifying dpkg, and building a mirroring system that could sign upstream repositories. Learn about our journey enhancing software integrity on a massive scale. This session is ideal for those interested in Linux security, package management, and Internet-scale system administration.