Announcing the OpenSSL Foundation Conference Scholarship recipients

The OpenSSL Foundation is pleased to announce that seven individuals have been selected to receive a Foundation Scholarship for the OpenSSL Conference in Prague on October 7-9, 2025. We are grateful for the time and attention that everyone gave to their applications, including those we were unable to fund.

The selected recipients come from six different countries and represent a variety of institutions. They are:

• Khushi Chhillar, University of Delhi, India
• Madjid Tehrani, Edinburgh Napier University, United Kingdom
• Muhammad Arif, Pakistani International Airlines (a government-owned airline), Pakistan
• Nikita Malik, University of Delhi, India
• Nikolas Gauder, Technical University of Munich, Germany
• Paul Louvel, IDEMIA (attending as an individual developer), France
• Sivakumar Natarajan, University of North Carolina Greensboro, United States

All recipients are actively engaging with OpenSSL in some capacity, and each made a compelling case for how attending the conference would benefit them and also have a positive impact on the OpenSSL project and beyond.

Madjid from Edinburgh Napier University, wrote about how attending the conference will help advance his research, adding, “My long-term goal is to bridge academic research and open-source implementation to ensure that the next generation of cryptographic infrastructure remains secure, performant, and accessible worldwide.”

Khushi and Nikita from the University of Delhi have collaborated on a variety of open source initiatives aimed at female students in particular. Khushi wrote, “By actively engaging with and organizing events for women in our university, such as coding workshops, mentorship programs, and awareness campaigns, we helped create pathways for women to participate in the open source community. This supports the OpenSSL value that all our communities are important, ensuring women have equal access and representation.”

Muhammad’s application expressed his passion for sharing knowledge with his local community. He wrote, “By attending, I will be able to bring cutting-edge cryptographic knowledge back to my organization and share it with Pakistan’s underrepresented cybersecurity community. My goal is to act as a bridge between the global open-source security ecosystem and local enterprise deployments, amplifying the real-world impact of OpenSSL in regions where strong security is most needed.”

The OpenSSL Foundation works to ensure that everyone has access to fundamental data privacy and security tools that are the backbone of internet protection. Providing scholarship support to offset registration and accommodation costs for the OpenSSL Conference is one way we realize this mission. Scholarships are funded through the generosity of the Foundation’s donors and supporters. We are especially grateful to the Code Protectors, whose unrestricted annual support provides us with the means and flexibility to undertake new initiatives like this one.

If you’ll be joining us at the OpenSSL Conference, we encourage you to seek out these deserving scholarship recipients, learn more about their work, and help them make the most of this special in-person learning opportunity!

Image by Sincerely Media for Unsplash.