Standing for 2026 TAB election

[Kees Cook <kees@kernel.org>]

Hello!

I'm volunteering again to stand for election to the LF Technical
Advisory Board.

My primary concern for Linux is its security. I'm a member of the
security@kernel.org response team, lead the Kernel Self-Protection
Project[1], and maintain[2] the kernel hardening, seccomp, pstore, and
exec/binfmt trees. As a result, I frequently work kernel-wide across many
subsystems (or many architectures) when helping land various security
defenses. This cross-maintainer work is a unique social and technical
challenge, and the topic of "security" is a similarly wide and unique
challenge. I'd like to continue to represent both of these concerns on
the TAB.

In addition, I also bring several "downstream" perspectives on how
the kernel is consumed, from those of a general-purpose distro (having
lead Ubuntu's security team) to those of special-purpose device vendors
(having worked on Chrome OS, Android, and Google Cloud).

Among other things over the last 2 years on the TAB, I've reviewed the
project continuity plan[3] and changes to security bug reporting[4], and
worked on codifying how we handle machine-generated contributions[5]. I
argued against an outright LLM ban, as it wouldn't be useful, realistic,
or enforceable[6]; it's much better we ask people to show their work,
which is a thing we can all actually review.

Thank you for your consideration,

-Kees

[1] https://kernsec.org/wiki/index.php/Kernel_Self_Protection_Project
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/?q=f%3A%22Kees+Cook%22+s%3A%22GIT+PULL%22
[3] https://git.kernel.org/linus/102606402f4f5
[4] https://git.kernel.org/linus/d49172bbd7eb0
    https://git.kernel.org/linus/3a68841d1d9b6
[5] https://git.kernel.org/linus/a66437c279795
[6] https://lore.kernel.org/all/202507301008.E109EB0F@keescook/

-- 
Kees Cook