For the minimal presence that Fedora Project had during FOSSASIA 2026, I am excited to share that we had a successful representation at the event, tending to upwards of 400 visitors, at the courtesy of our friends at GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. sharing their booth space with us. Conversations ranged from hardware enablement for ARMv9 devices to onboarding contributors to Fedora Infrastructure, and from community-wide discussions around AI-assisted contribution policies to sharing how Fedora Linux is the best place to start from to contribute to enterprise distros. As I unpack my experiences from FOSSASIA 2026, I cannot help but rejoice, reminiscing about the conversations that I have had with the following folks. - Mishari Muqbil not only organised a FOSSASIA Unofficial Cycling Trip, but also helped us visitors from afar connect as humans before contributors. 🚴 - Hong Phuc Dang welcomed us Fedora Project folks, as not just the founder of FOSSASIA but also as the force multiplier of the community. 🫂 - Mario Behling spent a great deal of time understanding how Fedora Infrastructure uses pretalx and how it compares against EventYay. 🛜 - Norbert Preining had been an enthusiastic host to my talk about the Fedora Badges Revamp Project scheduled at the tail end of the event. 🤠 - Aaditya Singh extended his embrace to us by allowing us to station at the GNOME Foundation community booth in a symbiotic representation. 💪 - Pongsakorn K also housed us at the KDE e.V. community booth while expressing their interest in RPM software packaging in Fedora Linux. 🧑‍🎓 - Simon Strohmenger and I had a deep conversation around how policies around AI-assisted contributions are rather crucial in this day and age. 🏛️ - Daniel Blueman found our collective to be the right place for his study on sustainable computing and hardware enablement on ARMv9 laptops. 🐿️ - Harish Pillay and I had a great discussion on how speakernotes can be used to create presentations using generative LLMs (you read that right). 🎥 - Folks from ExpressVPN organising the FOSSASIA Hackathon felt like kindred spirits with their approach towards FOSS contributions. 🌐 - Rajan Shah was one of the critical reasons why speakers in the Training Rooms were able to effortlessly conduct their presentations. 🤝 - Samyak Jain (and his laptop) had been an amazing support in helping my presentation about onboarding folks to Fedora Infrastructure succeed. ✈️ - Countless folks who visited us to state just how proud they were of using Fedora Linux and/or contributing to Fedora Project when they could. 🩷 - Countless folks at their community booths that presented projects with pride and connected with visitors with love in the open source way. 💡 With the learning and excitement at the event being as addictive as it was, I am already looking forward to visiting FOSSASIA 2027 with Fedora Project! #foss #opensource #fedora #release #infrastructure #community #redhat #fossasia

The “black box” in your hallway exacerbates a power imbalance. At the FOSSASIA Summit 2026 Dheeraj Reddy Jonnalagadda is going to show us how to level the playing field. Much of the history of the open source movement — and particularly the Free Software Movement — is a history of redressing power imbalances. When software is closed and code is kept secret, it becomes a tool for organizations to exert control over individuals. It allows vendors to compel costly upgrades, block interoperability, and hide vulnerabilities. For most of my adult life, I have worked to reduced these asymmetries, because I believe that the systems we rely on for our civil liberties must be transparent to be trustworthy. In few places is this power imbalance more physical, or more intrusive, than the plastic box sitting in your hallway: the ISP-supplied router. ## The Hidden Cost of the “Black Box” We are asked to trust these devices implicitly. They mediate our banking, our private communications, and our work. Yet, for most users, they are total black boxes. We cannot audit the code they run. We cannot verify if they are patched against the latest CVE. We are effectively tenants in our own digital infrastructure, renting access from a landlord who holds all the keys. But the cost isn’t just security; it’s sovereignty. * Want to block ads network-wide? You can’t, because you don’t have root. * Want to segregate your insecure IoT lightbulbs from your work laptop? You can’t, because VLANs are locked out. * Want to use encrypted DNS to stop your ISP from selling your browsing history? Good luck changing those settings. This is why, when we were curating the Cybersecurity & Privacy track for FOSSASIA 2026, we looked for talks that didn’t just discuss security in the abstract, but offered practical tools to reclaim it. ## Meet the Speaker: Dheeraj Reddy Jonnalagadda Dheeraj is a Senior Flight Software Engineer at Pixxel, where he builds embedded systems for space technology — a domain where “trust” isn’t a sentiment, but a verifiable engineering constraint. If code fails in orbit, the satellite is dead. He applies that same rigorous skepticism to the terrestrial hardware we use every day. ## The Session: “Don’t Trash It, Hack It” On Monday, March 9, Dheeraj is leading a session titled Don’t Trash It, Hack It: Reverse engineering secrets & repurposing ISP Routers. This session is a masterclass in auditability. Dheeraj will demonstrate the process of: * The Teardown: Analyzing the binary structure of a locked-down firmware image. * The Breach: Uncovering hard-coded backdoor credentials (the ultimate breach of trust that vendors often leave behind). * The Repurpose: Gaining root access to transform the device from a passive “ISP endpoint” into an active “User-Controlled Firewall.” ## Why This Matters This isn’t just about saving a few dollars on hardware or reducing e-waste (though keeping plastic out of the landfill is a noble bonus). It is about the fundamental principle that you cannot secure what you cannot understand. If we want an Internet that is trustworthy — one that protects individuals rather than just serving as a vector for surveillance or crime — we need to start by owning the edge of the network. We need to move from blind faith in our ISPs to verified Trust. Dheeraj is giving us the crowbar to open the black box. I hope you’ll join us to see what’s inside. ## Join Us in Bangkok * Session: Don’t Trash It, Hack It * Track: Cybersecurity & Privacy * When: March 9, 08:45 AM * Tickets: EventYay

I spent years building commercial security appliances. Here is why Shivani Bhardwaj’s return to FOSSASIA supports the shift in who owns network defense. In the early 2000s, I served as CTO of CounterSnipe. Our core business was building Network Intrusion Prevention System (NIPS) appliances. At the time, the industry revolved around Snort. It was the engine that powered the sector, and for many years, if you wanted serious traffic analysis, you bought a black box appliance and hired a team to watch it. Today the landscape of network defense is shifting. The boundary between enterprise security and personal privacy is dissolving. ## The Enterprise-Only Myth There is a long-standing assumption that Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are too complex for smaller deployments. The argument goes that without a dedicated Security Operations Center (SOC), the data is useless. I disagree. And it seems the Open Information Security Foundation (OISF) does too. Yesterday, the Suricata team hosted a webinar specifically on Suricata in Homelab and SOHO, validating a growing trend: individuals and small organizations are no longer content to rely on opaque ISP routers or basic firewalls. They want the same visibility that the banks have. They want to see the traffic on their own wire. ## The Governance Advantage This democratization is why I am so pleased to include Suricata in this year’s track. Unlike the tools of my CounterSnipe days, Suricata is backed by a non-profit foundation (OISF). This matters. In my talk last year on addressing the limits of the F/OSS approach, I identified foundations as homes for F/OSS projects as one of the mechanisms for ensuring that a project serves its community, not just a vendor’s shareholders. **Governance is a security feature**. In this case it ensures that the eyes of the network remain open. # Welcome Back: Shivani Bhardwaj This brings me to our speaker. I am delighted to welcome Shivani Bhardwaj back to the FOSSASIA Summit (she previously spoke in 2024, also on Suricata). Shivani is the ideal person to bridge the gap between hardcore engineering and community access: * As a Suricata developer, she works on the heavy lifting—writing the C and Rust code that makes Suricata fast enough to handle modern throughput. * As an Outreachy mentor, she helps underrepresented groups break into open source system programming. She understands that building a tool is only half the battle; teaching people to use it is equally important. ## The Session: Hands-On Defense On Monday, March 9, Shivani is leading a session titled A demonstration of hands-on network security with Suricata. This is not a sales pitch. It is a practitioner’s workshop designed to turn you into the analyst. She will cover: * How to get enterprise-grade inspection running on your own hardware. * How to write custom signatures so you catch what you care about (privacy leaks, IoT chatter) without drowning in noise. * How to modify existing signatures to expose the details that you care about. ## Why This Matters You don’t need a SOC to benefit from better visibility. Whether you are a student, a privacy advocate, or a sysadmin, you have the right to understand what is entering and leaving your network. Come to Bangkok to learn the tool. Stay to support the community that keeps it open. ## Join Us * Session: A demonstration of hands-on network security with Suricata * Speaker: Shivani Bhardwaj * Track: Cybersecurity & Privacy * When: March 9, 02:45 PM * Tickets: EventYay