Open Source Security Podcast

Josh and Kurt talk about two documents from the US government that discuss open source in very different ways. The CISA document lays out a way to measure open source, but we take issue with the idea of trying to measure which open source projects are "good". The Whitehouse on the other hand takes an approach that is very open source, get involved. Trying to measure open source isn't producing anything actionable, but getting involved is very actionable, and very much how open source works. Show Notes CISA: Continued Progress Towards a Secure Open Source Ecosystem Whitehouse: Administration Cybersecurity Priorities for the FY 2026 Budget

Josh and Kurt talk about a pretty big bug found in CocoPods ownership. We also touch on a paper that discusses the technical debt that open source should have. We discuss what the long term sustainability of open source. There aren't any good solutions for open source today, but talking about these problems is important, we have to start to understand what's going on before we can plausibly discuss solutions. If you're an open source project that needs to put things on pause, or even walk way, that's OK. Show Notes CocoaPods Vulnerabilities Could Hit Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, TikTok, Snap and More The Expense of Unprotected Free Software Long-term maintenance of PCRE2 #426

Josh and Kurt talk about the recent OpenSSH vulnerability and the node-ip project owner taking their project private. They're quasi related in the context of two open source projects handled bugs very differently. The OpenSSH bug isn't really as serious as it seems, but you still want to patch. The node-ip bug is a very different story. The relationship between users and open source developers is one experiencing more strain now than we've ever seen. It's a weird conversation and we don't have good answers. Security in general is a collection of unsolvable problems. Show Notes Qualys security advisory Hacker News Discussion Security Cryptography Whatever Dev rejects CVE severity, makes his GitHub repo read-only

Josh and Kurt talk about the latest polyfill.io mess. Apparently someone took over a very popular project and started to serve malware. First XZ, now this. What does it mean for open source? We don't have any answers, and it's hard to even talk about this problem because it's so big. The thing is though, even if we can't fix open source, it's here to stay. Show Notes Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites OpenSSF Scorecard

Josh and Kurt talk about three wangles of responsibility. We start with a story about a bike theft ring, bike theft doesn't usually get any attention, but this one is special. Then we ask why it seems like everyone is getting hacked, it's because they have to tell us now. And finally we have a story about the huge number of unreported vulnerabilities in open source projects. This statistic probably affects all software, but there's some numbers for open source specifically. Show Notes The West Coast’s Fanciest Stolen Bikes Are Getting Trafficked by One Mastermind in Jalisco, Mexico $5 million worth of stolen tools recovered thanks to Apple's AirTag — 12 secret storage facilities had around 15,000 construction tools Vulnerability fixes in plain sight: How your scanners are missing hundreds of vulnerabilities

Josh and Kurt talk about a new proposal from OpenSSH to add a timeout to penalize clients misbehaving. But this then brings up the typical security conversation of "if it's not perfect we shouldn't do it". Trying new things is a good thing, even if something fails, we learn a lesson that we can use in the future. Show Notes OpenSSH introduces options to penalize undesirable behavior Hacker News comments

Josh and Kurt talk to Alex Kulagin from Flipper about the Flipper Zero. It's one of the coolest hacker devices that exists on the market. We talk about what it is, how it started, what it can (and can't) do. It's a really fun conversation. Show Notes Flipper Zero Website Headphone jack radio capture Flipper Zero on Tik Tok

Josh and Kurt talk about a blog post titled "Your API Shouldn't Redirect HTTP to HTTPS". It's an interesting idea, and probably a good one. There is however a lot of baggage in this space as you'll hear in the discussion. There's no a simple solution, but this is certainly something to discuss. Show Notes Your API Shouldn't Redirect HTTP to HTTPS Hacker News discussion HSTS Section 5.1

Josh and Kurt talk about a blog post about frozen kernels being more secure. We cover some of the history and how a frozen kernel works and discuss why they would be less secure. A frozen kernel is from when things worked very differently. What sort of changes will we see in the future? Show Notes Kurt's strange coffee Why a 'frozen' distribution Linux kernel isn't the safest choice for security

Josh and Kurt talk about open source and autonomy. This is even related to some recent return to office news. The conversation weaves between a few threads, but fundamentally there's some questions about why do people do what they do, especially in the world of open source. This also is a problem we see in security, security people love to tell developers what to do. Developers don't like being told what to do. Show Notes pycurl issue Apple, SpaceX, Microsoft return-to-office mandates drove senior talent away RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us Sudo-rs dependencies: when less is better phishing webcomic Debian OpenSSL Bug (16 years)

Josh and Kurt talk about a new to sign artifacts on GitHub. It's in beta, it's not going to be easy to use, it will have bugs. But that's all OK. This is how we start. We need infrastructure like this to enable easier to use features in the future. Someday, everything will be signed by default. Show Notes GitHub artifact attestation

Josh and Kurt talk about a sudo replacement going into systemd called run0. It sounds like it'll get a lot right, but systemd is a pretty big attack surface and not everyone is a fan. We shall have to see if this ends up replacing sudo. Show Notes Conan O'Brien on Hot Ones Lennart's Mastodon thread xkcd automation

Josh and Kurt talk about a paper describing using a LLM to automatically create exploits for CVEs. The idea is probably already happening in many spaces such as pen testing and intelligence services. We can't keep up with the number of vulnerabilities we have, there's no way we can possibly keep up with a glut of LLM generated vulnerabilities. We really need to rethink how we handle vulnerabilities. Show Notes OpenAI's GPT-4 can exploit real vulnerabilities by reading security advisories paper: LLM Agents can Autonomously Exploit One-day Vulnerabilities Cisco Fixes RV320/RV325 Vulnerability by Banning “curl” in User-Agent Episode 219 – Chat with Larry Cashdollar Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI?

Josh and Kurt talk about a database of game cheaters. Cheating in games has many similarities to security problems. Anti cheat rootkits are also terrible. The clever thing however is using statistics to identify cheaters. Statistics don't lie. Also, we discuss the Pretendo project sitting on a vulnerability for a year, is this ethical? Show Notes Hacker News searchable database Benford's law John Oliver Medicaid Mario64 invisible walls Pretendo Pretendo exploit

Josh and Kurt talk about a Notepad++ fake website. It's possibly not illegal, but it's certainly ethically wrong. We also end up discussing why it seems like all these weird and wild things keep happening. It's probably due to the massive size of open source (and everything) now. Things have gotten gigantic and we didn't really notice. Show Notes Help us to take down the parasite website Open Source is bigger than you can imagine Toronto Pearson International Airport heist

Josh and Kurt talk about a new FCC program to provide a cybersecurity certification mark. Similar to other consumer safety marks such as UL or CE. We also tie this conversation into GrapheneOS, and what trying to claim a consumer device is secure really means. Some of our compute devices have an infinite number of possible states. It's a really weird and hard problem. Show Notes GrapheneOS FCC approves cybersecurity label for consumer devices Cyber Trust Mark Logo

Josh and Kurt talk about the recent events around XZ. It's only been a few days, and it's amazing what we already know. We explain a lot of the basics we currently know with the attitude much of these details will change quickly over the coming week. We can't fix this problem as it stands, we don't know where to start yet. But that's not a reason to lose hope. We can fix this if we want to, but it won't be flashy, it'll be hard work. Show Notes GossiTheDog's Blog Post fr0gger diagram OpenSSF Blog (archive) stb library

Josh and Kurt talk about the security.txt file. It's not new, but it's not something we've discussed before. It's a great idea, an easy format, and well defined. It's not high on many of our todo lists, but it's something worth doing. Show Notes RFC 9116

Josh and Kurt talk about the new SSDF attestation form from CISA. The current form isn't very complicated, and the SSDF has a lot of room for interpretation. But this is the start of something big. It's going to take a long time to see big changes in supply chain security, but we're confident they will come. Show Notes Secure Software Development Attestation Form The U.S. Military Is Missing Six Nuclear Weapons NIST 800-218

Josh and Kurt talk about what's going on at the National Vulnerability Database. NVD suddenly stopped enriching vulnerabilities, and it's sent shock-waves through the vulnerability management space. While there are many unknowns right now, the one thing we can count on is things won't go back to the way they were. Show Notes Anchore's Blog Grype Josh's Cyphercon Talk Ecosyste.ms Episode 266 – The future of security scanning with Debricked