Congratulations, Walter Pearce: OpenSSF Ambassador!
We are thrilled to share some exciting news: Walter Pearce, Security Engineer at the Rust Foundation and a key leader of the Rust Foundation’s Security Initiative, was recently named to the inaugural cohort of the OpenSSF Ambassador Program.
The OpenSSF Ambassador Program was created to recognize passionate open source security advocates who embody the OpenSSF’s vision of a world where open source software is secure by default. Being selected for the very first cohort, alongside just 12 other community leaders from around the globe, is a meaningful honor, and one that speaks directly to Walter’s dedication, depth of expertise, and the collaborative spirit he brings to this work every day.
About Walter
Walter brings over 14 years of security experience to the Rust Foundation, with the past seven focused on offensive security in the gaming industry. Before joining us, he led vulnerability discovery and mitigation efforts at Epic Games and Blizzard Entertainment, protecting tens of millions of players. Prior to that, he spent years as a security consultant providing penetration testing, red teaming, and code review services for Fortune 100 companies across operating systems, languages, and embedded systems. Walter is also an open source contributor at heart: he was previously a contributor and member of the Amethyst Game Engine and has led contributions across open source game development projects.
Walter’s Rust Security Work
At the Rust Foundation, Walter helps lead the Rust Foundation Security Initiative, driving work that goes to the core of what OpenSSF was created to advance: a more secure open source supply chain.
Funded in large part by OpenSSF’s Alpha-Omega Project, the Security Initiative has made significant strides since its inception from hardening the crates.io publishing pipeline to responding to active threats. One recent example: when a phishing attack targeted the owners of many popular crates in September 2025, a coordinated response spanning the Rust Project, the Rust Foundation, and Alpha-Omega was crucial to its rapid mitigation. This is exactly the kind of cross-community collaboration OpenSSF was built to make possible.
The Security Initiative has also invested in making vulnerability information more accessible to everyday developers: crates.io now includes a security tab that surfaces known advisories from the RustSec database directly on package pages, bringing that data to the point of discovery rather than after the fact. Other advances include Trusted Publishing, which eliminates the need for long-lived API tokens in the publishing pipeline, along with automated incident response and GitHub Secret Scanning integration. Walter has been at the center of this work, and his selection as an OpenSSF Ambassador reflects both his individual expertise and the Rust Foundation’s commitment to holding a seat at the table where the future of software supply chain security is being shaped.
The Significance of This Distinction
The OpenSSF brings together the industry’s most committed voices on open source security, and the Ambassador Program amplifies those voices globally. In this role, Walter will represent OpenSSF and, by extension, the values the Rust Foundation shares around safe, secure software at industry events, in working groups, and across the broader community.
We are proud to have someone of Walter’s caliber flying the flag for both Rust and open source security on this new stage. Please join us in congratulating him! Follow Walter’s work through the OpenSSF community.
Thank you, as always, to OpenSSF and the Alpha-Omega Project for their commitment to sustainable security improvements across open source!
