Daemonic Dispatches

New FreeBSD Security Officer

A few minutes ago I sent the following email, copied here in its entirety, to the freebsd-security mailing list:

When I took over from Jacques Vidrine as FreeBSD Security Officer in August 2005, I had three goals: Adding FreeBSD Update to the base system as an officially supported tool; keeping the FreeBSD Update and Portsnap build and mirror systems running smoothly; and ensuring that we maintain the high quality of our security advisories and patches. I've definitely achieved the first two, and while Jacques' shoes have been hard to fill, I hope you will agree that we haven't done badly on the third.

Most of the credit for this goes to all the FreeBSD developers who have served on the Security Team over the past 80 months: Marcus Alves Grando, Qing Li, Xin Li, Remko Lodder, George V. Neville-Neil, Simon L. Nielsen, Philip Paeps, Christian S.J. Peron, Tom Rhodes, Guido van Rooij, Stanislav Sedov, Dag-Erling Smorgrav, Jacques Vidrine, Robert Watson, Martin Wilke, and Bjoern A. Zeeb. For administrative reasons I've often been the person committing security patches to the tree, and I think this misleads some people into thinking that I do all of the work; nothing could be further from the truth.

Regrettably, like most FreeBSD developers I have commitments outside of FreeBSD, and as my online backup service (Tarsnap) has grown, so too have its demands on my time. I recently came to the conclusion that I could no longer give the role of Security Officer the time it deserved — and more importantly, the availability to handle important issues on short notice — and as such I decided that it was time for my term as Security Officer to come to an end. While I'll be remaining on the Security Team to offer opinions and advice about security issues, and I'll still be managing the FreeBSD Update and Portsnap bits, it's time to let someone else drive the bus.

I asked the FreeBSD Core Team to offer the Security Officer role to Simon Nielsen, and I am happy to say that they agreed and Simon accepted the position. Simon has been a FreeBSD committer since July 2003, a member of the FreeBSD Security Team since October 2004, and a Deputy Security Officer — taking responsibility for pushing out security advisories when I have been temporarily unavailable — since August 2005; I think it's safe to say that Simon is more prepared for this position than any new FreeBSD Security Officer has ever been.

Thank you for all the support and bug reports you've provided over the years, and please join me in welcoming Simon to his new role.

To pre-empt any slashdot trolls: FreeBSD is not dying, and I have no intention of leaving the project. I'm handing off the Security Officer hat to Simon because my occupation with Tarsnap (very literally — it's my day job) means that Simon can do a better job as Security Officer than I can right now; but I just came back from BSDCan and a fantastic FreeBSD developer summit and I have every intention of staying engaged with the project long into the future.

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