Application Security Weekly (Audio)

Secure coding education should be more than a list of issues or repeating generic advice. Liran Tal explains his approach to teaching developers through examples that start with exploiting known vulns and end with discussions on possible fixes. Not only does this create a more engaging experience, but it also relies on code that looks familiar to developers rather than contrived or overly simplistic examples. Segment resources: https://github.com/lirantal https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/NPMSecurityCheat_Sheet.html https://lirantal.com/blog/poor-express-authentication-patterns-nodejs The challenge of evaluating threat alerts in aggregate – what a collection and sequence of threat signals tell us about an attacker’s sophistication and motives – has bedeviled SOC teams since the dawn of the Iron Age. Vectra AI CTO Oliver Tavakoli will discuss how the design principles of our XDR platform deal with this challenge and how GenAI impacts this perspective. Segment Resources: Vectra AI Platform Video: https://vimeo.com/916801622 Blog: https://www.vectra.ai/blog/what-is-xdr-the-promise-of-xdr-capabilities-explained Blog: https://www.vectra.ai/blog/xdr-explored-the-evolution-and-impact-of-extended-detection-and-response MXDR Calculator: https://www.vectra.ai/calculators/mxdr-value-calculator This segment is sponsored by Vectra AI. Visit https://securityweekly.com/vectrarsac to learn more about them! In this interview, we will discuss the network security challenges of business applications and how they can also be the solution. AlgoSec has spent over two decades tackling tough security issues in some of the world’s most complex networks. Now, they’re applying their expertise to hybrid networks—where customers are combining their on-premise resources along with multiple cloud providers. Segment Resources: https://www.algosec.com/resources/ This segment is sponsored by AlgoSec. Visit https://securityweekly.com/algosecrsac to learn more about them! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-286

Everyone is interested in generative AIs and LLMs, and everyone is looking for use cases and apps to apply them to. Just as the early days of the web inspired the original OWASP Top 10 over 20 years ago, the experimentation and adoption of LLMs has inspired a Top 10 list of their own. Sandy Dunn talks about why the list looks so familiar in many ways -- after all, LLMs are still software. But the list captures some new concepts that anyone looking to use LLMs or generative AIs should be aware of. https://llmtop10.com/ https://github.com/OWASP/www-project-top-10-for-large-language-model-applications/wiki/Educational-Resourceshttps://owasp.org/www-project-ai-security-and-privacy-guide/https://gandalf.lakera.ai/https://quarkiq.com/blog How companies are benefiting from the enterprise browser. It's not just security when talking about the enterprise browser. It's the marriage between security AND productivity. In this interview, Mike will provide real live case studies on how different enterprises are benefitting. Segment Resources: https://www.island.io/resourceshttps://www.island.io/press This segment is sponsored by Island. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/islandrsac to learn more about them! The cybersecurity landscape continues to transform, with a growing focus on mitigating supply chain vulnerabilities, enforcing data governance, and incorporating AI into security measures. This transformation promises to steer DevSecOps teams toward software development processes with efficiency and security at the forefront. Josh Lemos, Chief Information Security Officer at GitLab will discuss the role of AI in securing software and data supply chains and helping developers work more efficiently while creating more secure code. This segment is sponsored by GitLab. Visit https://securityweekly.com/gitlabrsac to learn more about them! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-285

A lot of AI security has nothing to do with AI -- things like data privacy, access controls, and identity are concerns for any new software and in many cases AI concerns look more like old-school API concerns. But...there are still important aspects to AI safety and security, from prompt injection to jailbreaking to authenticity. Caleb Sima explains why it's important to understand the different types of AI and the practical tasks necessary to secure how it's used. Segment resources: https://calebsima.com/2023/08/16/demystifing-llms-and-threats/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgDtOu17E&t=1s We already have bug bounties for web apps so it was only a matter of time before we would have bounties for AI-related bugs. Keith Hoodlet shares his experience winning first place in the DOD's inaugural AI bias bounty program. He explains how his education in psychology helped fill in the lack of resources in testing an AI's bias. Then we discuss how organizations should approach the very different concepts of AI security and AI safety. Segment Resources: https://securing.dev/posts/hacking-ai-bias/ https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3659519/cdao-launches-first-dod-ai-bias-bounty-focused-on-unknown-risks-in-llms/ Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-284

Companies deploy tools (usually lots of tools) to address different threats to supply chain security. Melinda Marks shares some of the chaos those companies still face when trying to prioritize investments, measure risk, and scale their solutions to keep pace with their development. Not only are companies still figuring out supply chain, but now they're bracing for the coming of genAI and how that will just further highlight the current struggles they're having with data security and data privacy. Segment Resources: Complete Survey Results: The Growing Complexity of Securing the Software Supply Chain https://research.esg-global.com/reportaction/515201781/Toc Misusing random numbers, protecting platforms for code repos and package repos, vulns that teach us about designs and defaults, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-283

How can open source projects find a funding model that works for them? What are the implications with different sources of funding? Simon Bennetts talks about his stewardship of Zed Attack Proxy and its journey from OWASP to OpenSSF to an Open Source Fellowship with Crash Override. Mark Curphy adds how his experience with OWASP and the appsec community motivated him to create Crash Override and help projects like ZAP gain the support they deserve. Segment resources: https://crashoverride.com/blog/welcome-zap-to-the-open-source-fellowshiphttps://www.zaproxy.org https://crashoverride.com/blog/are-there-too-many-bubbles-of-similar-security-efforts CISA chimes in on the XZ Utils backdoor, PuTTY's private keys and maintaining a secure design, LeakyCLI and maintaining secure secrets in CSPs, LLMs and exploit generation, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-282

There are as many paths into infosec as there are disciplines within infosec to specialize in. Karan Dwivedi talks about the recent book he and co-author Raaghav Srinivasan wrote about security engineering. There's an appealing future to security taking on engineering roles and creating solutions to problems that orgs face. We talk about the breadth and depth of security engineering and ways to build the skills that will help you in your appsec career. Segment resources: https://kickstartseceng.com A Rust advisory highlights the perils of parsing and problems of inconsistent approaches, D-Link (sort of) deals with end of life hardware, CSRB recommends practices and processes for Microsoft, Chrome’s V8 Sandbox increases defense, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-281

We look into the supply chain saga of the XZ Utils backdoor. It's a wild story of a carefully planned long con to add malicious code to a commonly used package that many SSH connections rely on. It hits themes from social engineering and abuse of trust to obscuring the changes and suppressing warnings. It also has a few lessons about software development, the social and economic dynamics of open source, and strategies for patching software. It's an exciting topic partially because so much other appsec is boring. And that boring stuff is important to get right first. We also talk about what parts of this that orgs should be worried about and what types of threats they should be prioritizing instead. Segment Resources: https://tukaani.org/xz-backdoor/ https://news.risky.biz/risky-biz-news-supply-chain-attack-in-linuxland/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-backdoor-almost-infected-linux-everywhere-the-xz-utils-close-call/#ftag=RSSbaffb68 https://therecord.media/malicious-backdoor-code-linux-red-hat-cisa https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/alerts/2024/03/29/reported-supply-chain-compromise-affecting-xz-utils-data-compression-library-cve-2024-3094 https://duo.com/decipher/carefully-crafted-campaign-led-to-xz-utils-backdoorhttps://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor OWASP leaks resumes, defining different types of prompt injection, a secure design example in device-bound sessions, turning an ASVS requirement into practice, Ivanti has its 2000s-era Microsoft moment, HTTP/2 CONTINUATION flood, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-280

Sometimes infosec problems can be summarized succinctly, like "patching is hard". Sometimes a succinct summary sounds convincing, but is based on old data, irrelevant data, or made up data. Adrian Sanabria walks through some of the archeological work he's done to dig up the source of some myths. We talk about some of our favorite (as in most disliked) myths to point out how oversimplified slogans and oversimplified threat models lead to bad advice -- and why bad advice can make users less secure. Segment resources: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/cybersecurity-myths-and/9780137929214/ The OWASP Top 10 gets its first update after a year, Metasploit gets its first rewrite (but it's still in Perl), PHP adds support for prepared statements, RSA Conference puts passwords on notice while patching remains hard, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-279

One of the biggest failures in appsec is an attitude that blames users for security problems. A lot of processes and workflows break down because of an insecure design or insecure defaults. Benedek Gagyi chats with us about the impact of the user experience (UX) on security and why it's not only important to understand how to make a user's life easier, but in defining who that user is in the first place. Segment resources: https://www.usenix.org/conference/8th-usenix-security-symposium/why-johnny-cant-encrypt-usability-evaluation-pgp-50 The GoFetch side channel in Apple CPUs, OpenSSF's plan for secure software developer education, fuzzing vs. formal verification as a security strategy, hard problems in InfoSec (and AppSec), and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-278

Lots of companies need cybersecurity programs, as do non-profits. Tyler Von Moll talks about how to get small organizations started on security and how to prioritize initial investments. While an appsec program likely isn't going to be one of the first steps, it's going to be an early one. What decisions can you make at the start that will benefit the program in the years that follow? What does an appsec program look like at a small scale? Segment Resources: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18HuKtwgwGMtEJ87CgkMqHp1JDVRUXPP--zptjMpF0/edit?usp=sharing https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/dbir/2023/master-guide/ Insecure defaults and insecure design in smart locks, FCC adopts Cyber Trust Mark labels for IoT devices, the ZAP project gets a new home, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-277

A majority of internet traffic now originates from APIs, and cybercriminals are taking advantage. Increasingly, APIs are used as a common attack vector because they’re a direct pathway to access sensitive data. In this discussion, Lebin Cheng shares what API attack trends Imperva, a Thales Company has observed over the past year, and what steps organizations can take to protect their APIs. This segment is sponsored by Imperva. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/imperva to learn more about them! The trivial tweaks to bypass authentication in TeamCity, ArtPrompt attacks use ASCII art against LLMs, annoying developers with low quality vuln reports, removing dependencies as part of secure by design, removing overhead with secure by design, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-276

The need for vuln management programs has been around since the first bugs -- but lots of programs remain stuck in the past. We talk about the traps to avoid in VM programs, the easy-to-say yet hard-to-do foundations that VM programs need, and smarter ways to approach vulns based in modern app development. We also explore the ecosystem of acronyms around vulns and figure out what's useful (if anything) in CVSS, SSVC, EPSS, and more. Segment resources: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/patch-management-needs-a-revolution-part-1https://next.redhat.com/blog/https://www.first.org/cvss/v4-0/https://www.first.org/epss/ https://deadliestwebattacks.com/appsec/2010/02/19/primordial-cross-site-scripting-xss-exploits A SilverSAML example similar to the GoldenSAML attack technique, more about serializing AI models for Hugging Face, OWASP releases 1.0 of the IoT Security Testing Guide, the White House releases more encouragement to move to memory-safe languages, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-275

Farshad Abasi joins us again to talk about creating a new OWASP project, the Secure Pipeline Verification Standard. (Bonus points for not being a top ten list!) We talk about what it takes to pitch a new project and the problems that this new project is trying to solve. For this kind of project to be successful -- as in making a positive impact to how software is built -- it's important to not only identify the right audience, but craft guidance in a way that's understandable and achievable for that audience. This is also a chance to learn more about a project in its early days and the opportunities for participating in its development! Segment resources https://github.com/OWASP/www-project-secure-pipeline-verification-standard--spvs- PrintListener recreates fingerprints, iMessage updates key handling for a PQ3 rating, Silent Sabotage shows supply chain subterfuge against AI models, 2023 Rust survey results, the ways genAI might help developers, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-274

Check out this interview from the ASW Vault, hand picked by main host Mike Shema! This segment was originally published on Dec 13, 2022. Threat modeling is an important part of a security program, but as companies grow you will choose which features you want to threat model or become a bottleneck. What if I told you, you can have your cake and eat it too. It is possible to scale your program and deliver higher quality threat models. Segment Resources: - Original blog: https://segment.com/blog/redefining-threat-modeling/ - Open Sourced slides: https://github.com/segmentio/threat-modeling-training Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/vault-asw-8

We've been scanning code for decades. Sometimes scanning works well -- it finds meaningful flaws to fix. Sometimes it distracts us with false positives. Sometimes it burdens us with too many issues. We talk about finding a scanning strategy that works well and what the definition of "works well" should even be. Segment Resources: https://www.lacework.com/blog/introducing-a-new-approach-to-code-security/ LLMs improve fuzzing coverage, the Shim vuln threatens Linux secure boot, considering AI application threat models, a new language for a configuration file format, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-273

We can't talk about OWASP without talking about lists, but we go beyond the lists to talk about a product security framework. Grant shares his insights on what makes lists work (and not work). More importantly, he shares the work he's doing to spearhead a new OWASP project to help scale the creation of appsec programs, whether you're on your own or part of a global org. Segment Resources: https://owasp.org/www-project-product-security-capabilities-framework/https://github.com/OWASP/pscfhttps://prods.ec/https://owaspsamm.orghttps://iso25000.com/index.php/en/iso-25000-standards/iso-25010 https://www.scmagazine.com/podcast-episode/application-security-weekly-242 Qualys discloses syslog and qsort vulns in glibc, Apple's jailbroken iPhone for security researchers, moving away from OpenSSL, what an ancient vuln in image parsing can teach us today, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-272

We return to the practice of presentations, this time with a perspective from a conference organizer. And we have tons of questions! What makes a topic stand out? How can an old, boring topic be given new life? How do you prepare as a first-time presenter? What can conferences do to foster better presentations and new voices? Segment resources: https://bsidessf.orghttps://infosec.exchange/@worldwise001/111280163638514582https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lVIeh5f4Rg Vulns in Jenkins code and Cisco devices that make us think about secure designs, MiraclePtr pulls off a relatively quick miracle, code lasts while domains expire, an "Artificial Intelligence chip" from the 90s, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-271

Where apps provide something of value, bots are sure to follow. Modern threat models need to include scenarios for bad bots that not only target user credentials, but that will also hoard inventory and increase fraud. Sandy shares her recent research as we talk about bots, API security, and what developers can do to deal with these. Segment resources https://www.forrester.com/blogs/avoid-a-bot-waterloo/ https://www.forrester.com/blogs/are-your-bot-management-tools-up-to-date-to-handle-the-holiday-season/ In the news, vulns throw a wrench in a wrench, more vulns drench Atlassian, vulns send GitLab back to the design bench, voting for the top web hacking techniques of 2023, and more! Visit https://securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/secweekly Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/secweekly Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-270

It's time to start thinking about CFPs and presentations for 2024! Eve shares advice on delivering technical topics so that an audience can understand the points you want to make. Then we show how developing these presentation skills for conferences helps with presentations within orgs and why these are useful skills to build for your career. Visit https://securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/secweekly Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/secweekly Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-269

We kick off the new year with a discussion of what we're looking forward to and what we're not looking forward to. Then we pick our favorite responses to "appsec in three words" and set our sights on a new theme for 2024. In the news, 23andMe shifts blame to users for poor password practices, abusing Google's OAuth2 through a MultiLogin endpoint, Rustls is memory safe and fast, AI enters OSINT, and more! Visit https://securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/secweekly Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/secweekly Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-268