Open Source Security Podcast

Josh and Kurt talk about three government activities happening around security. CISA has a request for comment, and an international strategic plan around cybersecurity. These are both good ideas, and hopefully will help drive change. But we also discuss an EU proposal that brings liability rules to software which sounds like a great way to force change to happen. Show Notes Request for Comment on Product Security Bad Practices Guidance FY2025-2026 CISA International Strategic Plan EU brings product liability rules in line with digital age and circular economy CSA Cloud Controls Matrix

Josh and Kurt talk about the Meshtastic open source project. It's a really slick mesh radio system that runs on very cheap radio equipment. This episode isn't very security related (there are a few things), but it is very open source. Show Notes Meshtastic Heltec LoRa 32(V3) Radio 465 Rutgers University Confirmed: Meshtastic and LoRa are dangerous Meshtastic Routing Issues & Deployment Scenarios TC2-BBS-mesh The Comms Channel Josh's BBS Heltec T114 bug

Josh and Kurt talk to Seth Larson from the Python Software Foundation about security the Python ecosystem. Seth is an employee of the PSF and is doing some amazing work. Seth is showing what can be accomplished when we pay open source developers to do some of the tasks a volunteer might consider boring, but is super important work. Show Notes Seth Larson XKCD PGP Signature Seth's Blog Python and Sigstore Deprecating PGP - PEP 761 Python SBOMs  

Josh and Kurt talk about the current Wordpress / WP Engine mess. In what is certainly a supply chain attack, the Advanced Custom Fields forking. This whole saga is weird and filled with chaos and stupidity. We have no idea how it will end, but we do know that the blog platform you use shouldn't be this exciting. The bad sort of exciting. Show Notes WordPress.org’s latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin Wordpress / WP Engine timeline Knorr German Recipes

Josh and Kurt talk about the recent CUPS issue. The vulnerability itself wasn't all that exciting, but the whole disclosure process was wild. There's a lot to talk about, many things didn't quite go as planned and it all leaked early. Let's talk about why and what it all means. Show Notes CUPS vulnerability Akamai report Wil Wheaton: being a nerd is not about what you love; it’s about how you love it

Josh and Kurt talk about a few things that have recently come out of CISA. They seem to be blaming the vendors for a lot of the problems, but there's also not any actionable advice telling the vendors what they should be doing. This feels like the classic case of "just security harder". We need CISA to be leading the way funding and defining security, not blaming vendors for giving the market what it demands. Show Notes iCloud Photos Downloader CISA boss: Makers of insecure software must stop enabling today's cyber villains A Security Market for Lemons CISA and FBI Release Secure by Design Alert on Eliminating Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities CISA Secure by Design Pledge Railroad Newsletter CISA Secure Software Development Attestation Form

Josh and Kurt talk about the 2024 Tidelift maintainer report. The report is pretty big and covers a ton of ground. We focus in a few of the statistics that should worry anyone who uses open source. We've known for a while developers are struggling, and the numbers back that up. This one feels like the old "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas". Show Notes THE 2024 TIDELIFT STATE OF THE OPEN SOURCE MAINTAINER REPORT Canadian passport Changelog Interviews #433 Pandas CVE

Josh and Kurt talk about some security researchers sort of taking over the .MOBI whois server. The story is a bit sensational, but we ask if it really matters? There are a lot of interesting possible attacks, but turning something like this into a good attack is really hard, maybe impossible. The researchers presented the findings in a very reasonable way. Show Notes We Spent $20 To Achieve RCE And Accidentally Became The Admins Of .MOBI Heinz says sorry for ketchup QR code that links to porn site

Josh and Kurt talk to Jay Jacobs about Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS). EPSS is a new way to view vulnerabilities. It's a metric for the likelyhood that a vulnerability will be exploited in the next 30 days. Jay explains how EPSS got to where it is today, how the scoring works, and how we can start to think about including it in our larger risk equations. It's a really fun discussion. Show Notes Jay Jacobs on LinkedIn EPSS Jay's graph animation Cyentia's A Visual Exploration of Exploits in the Wild

Josh and Kurt talk about Chrome unexpectedly going EOL on Ubuntu 18. Keeping old things alive is really hard to do, and in open source it's becoming more common to just run the latest version rather than trying to keep old versions alive for long periods of time. Show Notes Chrome dumped support for Ubuntu 18.04 – but it'll be back Linus Torvalds talks AI, Rust adoption, and why the Linux kernel is 'the only thing that matters' Pidgin backdoor

Josh and Kurt talk about a story that discusses a story from Black Hat that references supply chains. There's a ton of doom and gloom around our software supply chains and much of the advice isn't realistic. If we want to take this seriously we need to stop obsessing over the little problems and focus on some big problems. Show Notes Black Hat USA 2024: Key Takeaways from the Premier Cybersecurity Event The Reason Train Design Changed After 1948

Josh and Kurt talk about a few stories around the TLS CA certificate world. It's all pretty dire sounding. There's not a lot of organization or process in the space, and the root CAs are literally the foundation of modern society, everything needs them to function. There's not a lot of positive ideas here, it's mostly a show where Kurt explains to Josh what's going on, because Josh doesn't want to care (and will continue to ignore all of this going forward). Show Notes Firefox's Mozilla follows Google in losing trust in Entrust's TLS certificates DigiCert Revocation Incident (CNAME-Based Domain Validation) List of Trust Lists

Josh and Kurt talk about CWE. What is it, and why does it matter. We cover some history, some shortcomings, and some ideas on how CWE could be used to make security a lot better. We frame the future discussion around the OWASP top 10 list. We should be putting more effort into removing removing entire classes of vulnerabilities. Show Notes CWE Episode 360 – Memory safety and the NSA Inside 22,734 Steam games

Josh and Kurt talk about a presentation Josh recently gave that was supposed to be about how open source works. The talk was the wrong topic for a security crowd, but there's a lot of interesting details in the questions and comments that emerged. It's clear a lot of security people don't really care about the fine details about what open source is, their primary goal is to help keep development secure. Show Notes Grassr00tz Pamela Chestek copyright paper Josh's presentation

Josh and Kurt talk about a story talking about the "graying" of open source. There doesn't seem to be many young people working on open source, but we don't really know why that is. There are many thoughts, but a better question is why should anyone get involved in open source anymore? The world has changed quite a lot since open source was created. Show Notes The graying open source community needs fresh blood OSPOs for Good 2024 Day 1 Part 1 Day 1 Part 2 Day 2 Part 1 Day 2 Part 2 FFmpeg bug JSON Editor Online https://rfc3339.com/

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