Open Source Security

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

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

Josh and Kurt talk about an attack against GitHub where attackers are creating malicious repositories then artificially inflating the number of stars and forks. This is really a discussion about how can we try to find signal in all the noise of a massive ecosystem like GitHub. Show Notes GitHub besieged by millions of malicious repositories in ongoing attack

Josh and Kurt talk about recent stories about data breaches, flipper zero banning, and realistic security. We have a lot of weird challenges in the world of security, but hard problems aren't impossible problems. Sometimes we forget that. Show Notes Mon Dieu! Nearly half the French population have data nabbed in massive breach Feds move to ban auto theft tech device 'Flipper Zero' Gmail and Yahoo's 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for your email program Vending machine error reveals secret face image database of college students

Josh and Kurt talk to GregKH about Linux Kernel security. We most focus on the topic of vulnerabilities in the Linux Kernel, and what being a CNA will mean for the future of Linux Kernel security vulnerabilities. The future of Linux Kernel security vulnerabilities is going to be very interesting. Show Notes Greg K-H Linux Kernel is a CNA Machine learning and stable kernels Bug reporting for Linux

Josh and Kurt talk to Thomas Depierre about some of the European efforts to secure software. We touch on the CRA, MDA, FOSDEM, and more. As expected Thomas drops a huge amount of knowledge on what's happening in open source. We close the show with a lot of ideas around how to move the needle for open source. It's not easy, but it is possible. Show Notes Thomas Depierre I am not a supplier Open Source In The European Legislative Landscape devroom Cyber Resilience Act The 2023 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report

Josh and Kurt talk about a blog post explaining how to create a very very small container image. Generally in the world of security less is more, but it's possible to remove too much. A lot of today's security tooling relies on certain things to exist in a container image, if we remove them we could actually result in worse security than leaving it in. It's a weird topic, but probably pretty important. Show Notes How I reduced the size of my very first published docker image by 40% - A lesson in dockerizing shell scripts Hacker News Discussion Episode 293 – Scoring OpenSSF Security Scoring

Josh and Kurt talk about open source projects proving builds, and things nobody wants to pay for in open source. It's easy to have unrealistic expectations for open source projects, but we have the open source capitalism demands. Show Notes Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds The things nobody wants to pay for Audacity privacy policy update has caused an outcry The History of X11

Josh and Kurt talk about an attack against PyTorch and NPM. The PyTorch attack shows the difficulty of trying to operate a large open source project. The NPM problem is one of the difficulty in trying to backdoor open source. A lot of people are watching and it only takes one person to notice a problem and we all benefit. Show Notes Peanut Butter the dog plays Gyromite The Wizard movie PyTorch supply chain attack npm Package Found Delivering Sophisticated RAT Deceptive Deprecation: The Truth About npm Deprecated Packages Changing a lightbulb Spelunking the Bitcoin Blockchain with Josh Bressers | CypherCon 4.0 Operation Triangulation - What You Get When Attack iPhones of Researchers 9th Annual State of the Software Supply Chain

Josh and Kurt talk about the 23andMe compromise and how they are blaming the users. It's obviously the the fault of the users, but there's still a lot of things to discuss on this one. Every company has to care about cybersecurity now, even if they don't want to. Show Notes Security leaders weigh in on 23andme hack Don't need a gun when you have a Donk - Crocodile Dundee 2 Hackers can infect network-connected wrenches to install ransomware My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined

Josh and Kurt talk about a grab bag of old technologies that defined the security industry. Technology like SELinux, SSH, Snort, ModSecurity and more all started with humble beginnings, and many of them created new security industries. Show Notes SELinux AppArmor SSH ModSecurity Snort Nmap Nessus What comes after open source

Josh and Kurt talk about package identifiers. We break this down in the context of an OpenSSF response to a CISA paper on software identifications. The identifiers that get all the air time are purl, CPE, SWID, and OmniBOR. This is a surprisingly complex problem space. It feels easy, but it's not. Show Notes OpenSSF CISA response purl CPE OmniBOR SWID

Josh and Kurt talk about how some hackers saved the day with a Polish train. We delve into a discussion about how we don't really own anything anymore if you look around. There's a great talk from the Blender Conference about this and how GPL makes a difference in the world of software ownership. It's sort of a dire conversation, but not all hope is lost. Show Notes Polish manufacturer accused of programming failures into its trains to gain more servicing business Polish Hackers Repaired Trains the Manufacturer Artificially Bricked. Now The Train Company Is Threatening Them Blender Conference Keynote Corey Doctorow Chicago has a problem until the year 2083 | Stand-up Maths Chicago Doesn't Own Its Own Streets | Climate Town

Josh and Kurt talk about a story asking for a Kubernetes LTS. Should open source projects have LTS versions? What does LTS even mean? Why is maintaining software so hard? It's a lively discussion all about the past, present, and future of open source LTS. Show Notes Why Kubernetes needs an LTS Linux gives up on 6-year LTS kernels, says they're too much work

It's the 2023 Christmas Spectacular! Josh and Kurt talk about what would happen if Santa starts using AI to judge which children are naughty and nice. There's some fun in this one, but it does get pretty real. While we tried to discuss Santa using AI, the reality is this sort of AI is coming for many of us. AI will be making decisions for all of us in the near future (if it isn't already). While less fun than we had hoped for, it's an important conversation. Show Notes Sea Elf Ollama UnitedHealth uses faulty AI to deny elderly patients medically necessary coverage, lawsuit claims Stephen Fry on AI Lawyer who cited cases concocted by AI asks judge to spare sanctions Hugging Face

Josh and Kurt talk about a few security stories about radio. The TETRA:BURST attack on police radios, spoofing GPS for airplanes near Iran, and Apple including cellular radios in the macbooks. The common thread between all these stories is looking at the return on investment for security. Sometimes good enough security is fine, sometimes it's not worth fixing certain security problems because the risk vs reward doesn't work out. Show Notes TETRA:BURST GPS spoofing attack Apple MacBooks cellular radio Mossad vs Not Mossad

Josh and Kurt talk about Capcom claiming modding a game is akin to cheating. The arguments used are fundamentally one of equity vs equality. Humans love to focus on equality instead of equity when we deal with most problems. This is especially true in the world of security. Rather than doing something that has a net positive, we ignore the details and focus on doing something that feels "right". Show Notes Why Capcom thinks PC game modding is akin to "cheating" Ben Heck

Josh and Kurt talk about the Canadian Government banning WeChat and Kaspersky. There's a lot of weird little details in this conversation. It fundamentally comes down to a conversation about risk. It's easy to spout nonsense about risk, but having an honest discussion about it is REALLY complicated. But the government plays by a very different set of rules. Show Notes Canada bans WeChat, Kaspersky applications on government devices Fitness tracking app Strava gives away location of secret US army bases Phishing emails increase over 1,200 percent since ChatGPT launch FedRAMP Rev 5 FAIR Institute

Josh and Kurt talk about the new EU eIDAS regulation. This is a bill that will force web browsers to add root certificates based on law instead of technical merits, which is how it's currently done. This is concerning for a number of reasons that we discuss on the show. This proposal is not a good idea. Show Notes Mozilla site Root CA mailing list UK eIDAS regulation EFF statement on eIDAS Fixed XKCD comic

Josh and Kurt talk about security skills shortage. We start out on the topic of cybersecurity skills and weave our way around a number of human related problems in this space. The world of tech has a lot of weird problems and there's not a lot of movement to fix many of them. Tech is weird and hard, and with the almost complete lack of regulation creates some of these challenges. In the world of security we need a better talent pipeline, but that takes actual efforts, not just complaining on the internet. Show Notes Schneier on security skill shortage British Airways flight smoke The Password Game Tesla accidents Lawn darts

Josh and Kurt talk about a proposed Dutch proposal that would allow the intelligence services to hack victims of adversaries they are in the process of infiltrating. The purpose of this discussion isn't to focus on the Dutch specifically, but rather to discuss the larger topic of government oversight. These are all very new concepts and nobody knows how things should work. Show Notes Dutch hacking proposal Give Me Toilet Paper! by Asuka424 in 9:54 - Summer Games Done Quick 2023 Flipper Zero Smart Meter Frequency Hopping Teri Kanfield

Josh and Kurt talk to Daniel Stenberg about curl. Daniel is the creator of curl, we chat with him about the security of curl. Daniel tells us how curl is kept secure, we learn about some of the historical reasons curl works the way it does. We hear the story about the curl CVE situation firsthand. We also touch on the importance of curating the community of a popular open source project. Show Notes Daniel's Mastodon account Curl The curl CVE blog Broken curl on PowerShell wolfSSL