Our people
Meet the experts protecting digital infrastructure
Matt Caswell leads OpenSSL Foundation and is responsible for ensuring the delivery of the OpenSSL Mission and Values. He is a subject matter expert in the OpenSSL Library’s SSL/TLS implementation. Matt has been a member of the OpenSSL development team for over 10 years and has implemented TLSv1.3 in OpenSSL as well as many other high profile features and capabilities.
Tomáš Mráz joined the OpenSSL team in 2021 as a Software Developer after being a long-time maintainer of the OpenSSL Library and other crypto packages in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Tomáš, along with his other roles, continues to do software development of the OpenSSL Library.
Richard Levitte has been an OpenSSL Library developer and committer since the very start of the project, as well as a maintainer for almost as long, and has been part of the OpenSSL team in a full time capacity since 2015. Richard’s major focus is on the crypto library, providers (and previously, engines), the build system and portability.
Jon Ericson is present on the Communities website as well as elsewhere. He started his career as a C programmer for the US National Weather Service and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. When Stack Overflow launched in beta, Jon was an early contributor and later joined as a full-time community manager for the entire Stack Exchange network. Recently he’s consulted with community owners to resolve a variety of social and technical hurdles.
Sherry Handel brings more than 25 years of executive leadership spanning the nonprofit, corporate, and economic development sectors to the OpenSSL Foundation. As the inaugural Executive Director of a global trade association, she grew membership by 2,150% across four continents, establishing the organization as a global thought leader in sustainable manufacturing. Sherry leads the Foundation's fundraising, business development, operations, communications, and external affairs in service of its mission.
Ryan Hooper is an Associate OpenSSL Foundation Engineer on part-time secondment from his role as Software Developer at Cisco Systems. With years of hands-on experience on many different platforms across both TLS and IPsec stacks, Ryan brings deep expertise in secure communications. At OpenSSL Foundation, he contributes to the advancement of open source cryptographic solutions; at Cisco, he helps integrate Common Crypto to achieve government certifications.
Daniel Kubec is a Senior Software Engineer with over twenty years of industry experience. He has expertise in operating systems, high-throughput networks, protocols, cryptography, and security-related domains. Daniel has worked at several successful cybersecurity startups and corporations, particularly in the telecommunications sector, along with his contributions to open-source security.
Igor Ustinov has been connected with the OpenSSL Library for nearly 20 years. His work focuses on adding new cryptographic algorithms and building the infrastructure that supports them. He also has extensive experience providing technical support for cryptographic software and ensuring compliance with information security standards.
Thanks to the support of Nominet DNS Fund, Jakub has been contracted to improve the OpenSSL Library's test suite. Jakub has been maintaining the PHP OpenSSL extension for over 10 years, along with other core parts of PHP, with a focus on networking and security. He is an experienced open-source contributor dedicated to improving secure communications, cryptographic integrations, and the reliability of internet-facing systems.
Michelle brings over 15 years of nonprofit leadership experience across fundraising, operations, and strategic communications. She has a strong track record of supporting senior leaders, strengthening internal systems, and helping organizations operate more effectively.
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Board of Directors
OpenSSL Foundation activities are supervised by a board of directors elected from among the Members. The Board of Directors elects the officer roles (President, Secretary, Treasurer).
Members
Members are responsible for electing the Board of Directors.
Foundation Advisory Committee
The Foundation Advisory Committee (FAC) provides the Foundation with feedback from the OpenSSL communities they represent about what the project should be prioritize. Representatives also advocate for OpenSSL within their respective communities. Members of the BAC through December 2025 are:
Academics – Shubham Kumar (NgKore)
Shubham Kumar is the Co-Founder of NgKore, India’s first open-source community focused on PQC and eBPF, and also a mentor within the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust (LFDT). His background is in network security and telecom, where he has spent the last few years working on how PQC can be integrated into next-generation systems. Along the way, he has authored technical reports, whitepapers, and patents on PQC migration strategies for different networks.
His journey with OpenSSL started long before he even realized it — back when he was tinkering on his first Ubuntu laptop. Since then, it has become a core part of his work. These days, he builds and tests PQC-enabled versions of internet protocols, and he has also had the chance to present his work on protocol migration using OpenSSL at the OpenSSL Conference, 2025.
He focuses on bringing every individual perspective into the Foundation’s strategic and technical roadmap. His goal is to ensure that decisions regarding OpenSSL’s direction reflect not only the needs of the industry but also the research and education community, which often pioneers new cryptographic ideas. He also wants to encourage more collaboration and engagement between universities, research labs, and open-source contributors so that innovation in cryptography doesn’t stay on paper—it reaches the people who build and secure the internet every day.
Academics – Nicola Tuveri (Tampere University)
A Researcher at Tampere University (Finland), Nicola contributed to OpenSSL for the first time in 2010, later he had the honor of becoming an OpenSSL Committer and serve in the OpenSSL Technical Committee since 2019.
Hi research specializes in software and micro architecture side-channel analysis and the integration of modern cryptosystems (lately mainly PQC) in mainstream libraries such as OpenSSL.
Committers – Igor Ustinov
Igor has been involved with the OpenSSL project for two decades.
Previously he served on the OpenSSL Foundation Technical Advisory Committee as a representative of the Individuals Community.
As both an active developer and a committer, he has been closely involved in the day-to-day technical work of the OpenSSL project.
Distributions – Clemens Lang (Red Hat)
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Crypto Team maintains and contributes to OpenSSL and other crypto libraries in Fedora, CentOS Stream, and RHEL. As the Product Owner for this team, Clemens has a good understanding of cryptography in distributions in general, but also how they use OpenSSL, and what concerns and problems they have with it.
Distributions – Dmitry Belyavsky (Red Hat)
Dmitry has worked with OpenSSL for 20+ years and interacted with various parts of OpenSSL code base. Now he maintains OpenSSL in Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS.
His goal is to ensure a transparent happy path for external contributors to be able to contribute to OpenSSL. PRs should be reviewed, and the mechanisms to get a review should be transparent.
Individuals – Randall Becker
Randall has been the community maintainer for the NonStop port of OpenSSL since 1.0.2. His participation in Open Source goes back to the early 1990s, when he was involved in porting NFS, RPC, and other smaller components to the NonStop platform. He started in the industry in 1979.
He provides perspectives and experience from exotic platforms to the OpenSSL team. He has served on the boards of directors of two companies (one as chair) and the Richmond Hill Board of Trade (director and chair). He also has extensive experience with Roberts New Rules of Order.
Individuals – Carla Jedani
Carla is an Australian lawyer, founder and researcher based in Munich, with a background spanning law, technology, governance and social impact. Her interest in open source began more than two decades ago, when she published on open-source software and its legal implications. Her more recent work has focused on emerging technologies, digital infrastructure, privacy, governance and community participation.
She is particularly interested in the governance of critical open-source infrastructure and in OpenSSL's evolving model of community participation. She brings an independent legal, governance and community perspective to the Advisory Committee, alongside the deep technical and OpenSSL-specific experience already represented within the community. She believes there is particular value in connecting OpenSSL with the much broader group of individuals who rely on open-source security infrastructure, but may not traditionally see themselves as participants in its community or governance.
Large Businesses – Dr. Yi Ouyang (Oracle)
Dr. Yi Ouyang is currently serving as the Director of Software Development at Oracle, where he lead the Oracle Crypto Foundation team. His team is responsible for managing network security, data encryption, and authentication technologies.
He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA in 2008. His academic research focused on encryption key management, data protection, and privacy in sensor networks, with several publications in prestigious international conferences. Since joining Oracle, he has played a key role in the development of various security products and features.
OpenSSL 3.x has seen increased adoption across enterprises and large organizations due to its robust implementation, pluggable architecture, superior performance, and support for FIPS. As enterprise solutions often face diverse customer requirements and that too under the most demanding operational conditions, they serve as ideal proxies for real-world use cases, extending the reach of OpenSSL into various mission-critical applications worldwide.
Oracle databases are used by hundreds of thousands of enterprises globally, powering some of the most sensitive and high-demand workloads. In alignment with industry standards and enterprise needs, Oracle has adopted OpenSSL 3.x as the cryptographic library for its database and related products. As the leader of the integration effort for OpenSSL within Oracle's database systems, he isuniquely positioned to bring real-world deployment insights and usage requirements to the OpenSSL community.
Small Businesses – [vacant]
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