An important part of the Rust Foundation’s mission is to steward the Rust language by actively supporting the volunteer maintainers that develop and govern the Rust Project. As the popularity and adoption of Rust continue to grow, it will be essential for its security practices to continue evolving alongside it. That's why we launched our Security Initiative in 2022 with generous support from the Open Source Security Foundation's Alpha-Omega project (OpenSSF Alpha-Omega), which identified Rust as a “Critical Open Source Software Project”. Thanks to this support from OpenSSF, we were able to create a new Security Engineer role at the Rust Foundation to help the hardworking Rust Project maintainers identify and tackle security priorities.
Today, we are thrilled to announce that Walter Pearce has joined the Rust Foundation as our new Security Engineer. Walter uses he/him pronouns.
In this position, Walter will be responsible for analyzing the code and infrastructure-level security of the Rust Project. He will provide security expertise, conduct assessments, and suggest areas for improvement for Rust and its ecosystem, including Cargo, crates.io, and more. We are excited to have Walter here to help advocate for best security practices across the entire Rust landscape and be a proactive resource for the Rust Project maintainers.
Walter comes from a 14-year career in security. For the past seven years, he has specialized in offensive security in the gaming industry, leading efforts to find and mitigate vulnerabilities affecting tens of millions of players at Epic Games and Blizzard Entertainment. Prior to that, he was a security consultant providing penetration testing, red teaming, and code review services for many Fortune 100 companies whose foci included operating systems, languages, and embedded systems. Walter has always had a passion for technical security problems and has built his career helping craft novel solutions to new challenging issues in security. In his spare time, Walter enjoys playing open source games. He was previously a contributor and member of the Amethyst Game Engine and a lead contributor on other open source game development projects.
In his own words on joining the Rust Foundation team as our new Security Engineer role, Walter says:
"I am deeply humbled and honored to be able to join the Rust Foundation and assist in securing a language and ecosystem I have so enjoyed being a part of. I have been using Rust professionally and personally for almost ten years and am excited to be able to fuse a personal passion with my professional career. I want to see the language grow and succeed, and I hope to bring my experience to the table to help make that happen. I think Rust is a language that can help solve so many of our problems in security today and that we have a strong foundation in the language, tools, and ecosystem to really start showing an impact. I cannot begin to express how happy I am to be a part of making that happen".
Walter will report to the Rust Foundation's Director of Technology, Joel Marcey, working with the Rust Foundation and Rust Project leadership to identify and tackle important Rust security priorities.
Welcome to the Rust Foundation, Walter!