Open Source Security

Josh and Kurt talk about a story from Microsoft declaring Rust the future of safe programming, replacing C and C++. We discuss how tooling affects progress and why this isn't always obvious when you're in the middle of progress. Show Notes Microsoft: Rust Is the Industry's 'Best Chance' at Safe Systems Programming Josh's devopsdays talk Microsoft moved font handling out of the kernel Atari 2600 emulator in Minecraft Rate of technology adoption

Josh and Kurt talk about the news that the NSO Group is widely distributing spyware onto a large number of devices. This news should be a wake up call for anyone creating devices and systems that could be attacked, it's time to segment services. There's not a lot individuals can do at this point, but we have some ideas at the end of the episode. Show Notes NSO Group spying Technical details Twitter thread Are we the Baddies?

Josh and Kurt talk about what happens when you lose access to your Single Sign On provider. These providers have become critical to many of us, if we lose access to our SSO account we will lose access to many services. Show Notes Postbank

Josh and Kurt talk about the events happening to the Audacity audio editor. What happens if a popular open source application is acquired by an unknown entity? Can this happen to other open source projects? What can we do about it? Show Notes SGDQ Paper Mario Paper Mario Arbitrary Code Execution explained Freenode Audacity acquired by Muse Group Audacity fork

Josh and Kurt talk about a listener provided question. Could SELinux have stopped the SolarWinds attack? Given what we know, the answer is technically yes, but practically no. SELinux is awesome, but it's very difficult to sandbox something like a build system. Show Notes Gone in 60 milliseconds

Josh and Kurt talk to Chris Weiland from Restore the Fourth Minnesota. Restore The Fourth Minnesota is nonprofit dedicated to restoring the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and ending unconstitutional mass government surveillance. Chris drops a ton of knowledge about how to be an effective tech activist, what his group is doing, and most importantly we get actionable advice! Show Notes Restore the Fourth Minnesota Restore the Fourth Minnesota on Twitter Writ of assistance Carpenter vs United States How many US federal laws are there? Restore the Fourth Episode 114 – Review of "Click Here to Kill Everybody" EFF EFA ACLU affiliates Glenn Greenwald TED talk

Josh and Kurt talk about how our environment affects our behavior, and in turn our level of security. We often ignore what's happening around us when everything is related. Show Notes Judges more lenient after a break Dungeons and Data Poverty changes your DNA

Josh and Kurt talk about why it seems like the world of ransomware has gotten out of control in the last few weeks. Every day there's some new and more bizarre ransomware story than we had yesterday. Show Notes Spurious Correlations Ransom recovered Adam Shostack Ransomware is not the problem Latvian Woman charged for writing ransomware

Josh and Kurt talk about Amazon sidewalk. There is a lot of attention, but how is this any different than the surveillance networks Apple and Google have built? Show Notes Amazon Sidewalk Ads and toothpaste Airtags and stalking

Josh and Kurt talk about AI driven comments. We live in a world of massive confusion and disruption where what is true and false, real and fake, are often widely debated. As AI grows and evolves what does it mean for this future? We don't really have any answers, but we ask a lot of questions. This isn't easy, nor will it be solved quickly, but solving it is not optional. Show Notes AIs and Fake Comments ACLU AMA Cloudflare Cryptographic Attestation of Personhood Evil bit Boris Johnson Painting Buses

Josh and Kurt talk about the Biden Administration new cybersecurity executive order. There are some good ideas in there, but at the end of the day it's an unfunded mandate. Unfunded mandates are difficult to implement. Show Notes Biden Executive Order Fact Sheet Obama's cyber EO

Josh and Kurt talk about how people handle problems. We open with the story of the Colonial Pipeline hack, but then go into some of the ways people tend to make problems worse. Show Notes Male vs Female trees Pipeline hack XKCD Pipelines TSA Pipeline Security

Josh and Kurt talk about dark patterns. A dark pattern is when a service tries to confuse a user into doing something they don't want to, like unknowingly purchasing a monthly subscription to something you don't need or want. The US Federal Trade Commission is starting to discuss dark patterns in webs sites and apps. Show Notes Dark Patterns Types of Dark Patterns FTC Bringing Dark Patterns to Light LTT Dell Warranty

Josh and Kurt talk about the University of Minnesota experimenting on the Linux Kernel. There's a lot to unpack in this one, but the TL;DR is you probably don't want to experiment on the kernel. Show Notes Linux Bans University of Minnesota for Sending Buggy Patches in the Name of Research University of Minnesota security researchers apologize for deliberately buggy Linux patches The International Obfuscated C Code Contest

Josh and Kurt talk about what 3rd party means in the current world. From 5G suppliers, to the Codecov and Solarwinds breaches. Is there anyone we can trust? Show Notes Europe and 5G Codecov Codecov Reuters story Red Hat OpenSSH advisory

Josh and Kurt talk about 0day security vulnerabilities. What are they? What were they? And why the name has taken on a new meaning, and that's OK. Show Notes Hacker History Podcast Chrome 0day NTFS Documentation

Josh and Kurt talk to Emil Wåreus from Debricked about the future of security scanners. Debricked is doing some incredibly cool things to avoid relying on humans for vulnerability identification and cataloging. Learn what the future of security scanning is going to look like. Show Notes Debricked Emil's Linkedin

Josh and Kurt talk about the PHP backdoor and the Ubiquity whistleblower. The key takeaway is to note how an open source project cannot cover up an incident, but closed source can and will cover up damaging information. Show Notes PHP backdoor Ubiquity coverup 3D printed TSA keys LockPickingLaywer Determining Key Shape from Sound Lock camera

Josh and Kurt talk to Mark Loveless from GitLab. We touch on DevSecOps, what GitLab is doing, threat modeling, and the time Mark tested positive for TNT at the airport. It's a great conversation. Show Notes Mark Loveless Twitter GitLab GitLab Handbook How we approach open source security PASTA threat modeling GitLab security features Tales from the Past - "You Tested Positive for TNT"

Josh and Kurt talk about how terrible daylight savings is. GitHub yanking some exploit code. And the Linux Foundation new project to sign all the things. Show Notes Researcher Publishes Code to Exploit Microsoft Exchange Vulnerabilities on Github GitHub content restrictions Reproducing the Microsoft Exchange Proxylogon Exploit Chain

Josh and Kurt talk to Loris Degioanni and Dan from Sysdig. Sysdig are the minds behind Falco, an amazing open source runtime security engine. We talk about where their technology came from, they huge code donation to the CNCF and what securing a modern infrastructure looks like today. Show Notes Sysdig Falco Loris' Twitter Dan "Pop" Popandrea's Twitter Sysdig contributes Falco's kernel module, eBPF probe, and libraries to the CNCF pdig Sysdig 2021 container security and usage report: Shifting left is not enough

Josh and Kurt talk about DWF. It's back and the intention is to have real community driven security identifiers! Show Notes Committee vs Community dwflist repo dwf-request tooling repo dwf-workflow policy repo CVE plateua graph iwantacve.org

Josh and Kurt talk with Dave Jevans CEO of CipherTrace and chairman of the anti-phishing working group about the challenges of keeping track of cryptocurrency in the modern age. Show Notes Dave's Twitter CipherTrace Anti Phishing Working Group

Josh and Kurt talk about the question "what is open source?" Why do we think it's broken today, and what sort of ideas about what should come next. Show Notes OSI Bruce Perens Post Open Source Josh's community blog post Corey Doctorow Uber Twitter thread

Josh and Kurt talk about the Google Project Zero report titled "A Year in Review of 0-days Exploited In-The-Wild in 2020". It's a cool report but we don't agree on the conclusion. The answer isn't to security harder, it's to stop using C. Show Notes Google Project Zero Year of 0-days Kurt's CUPS tweet

Josh and Kurt talk about the recent sudo and libgcrypt security vulnerabilities. What's the deal with these buffer overflows and TOCTU bugs? Show Notes Sudo buffer overflow Sudo SELinux bug libgcrypt buffer overflow

Josh and Kurt talk about 8 bit computing. What sort of security lessons can we learn from the 8 bit world? More than you think. Show Notes Legend of Zelda Random Number Generation Green rocket flame SR71 leaked fuel How do Namibian Himbas see colour? Suptuple meter music

Josh and Kurt talk about what we can stop doing. We take a position of asking "does it spark joy" for tools and infrastructure. Everyone is doing something they should stop. Show Notes Does it spark joy?

Josh and Kurt talk about the new right to repair rules in the EU. There's a strange line between loving the idea of right to repair, but also being horrified as security people at the idea of a device being on the Internet for 30 years. Show Notes EU right to repair repair.eu

Josh and Kurt talk about this idea that seems to exist in security of "attackers only need to be right once" which is silly. The reality is attackers have to get everything right, defenders really only need to get it right once. But "defenders only need to be right once" isn't going to sell any products. Show Notes Richard Feynman and manhole covers Richard Feynman on Why He Can't Tell You How Magnets Work Israeli airport security FAA stolen sweater XKCD Is it worth the time CGP Grey The trouble with transporters

Josh and Kurt talk about a report on open source security from the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security. The title pretty much sums it up. Show Notes Security Considerations for Open Source Build an 8 bit computer from scratch

Josh and Kurt talk about communication. It's really hard to talk about a lot of what we do. How do we know if a device is secure? How do we know our knowledge is correct? Show Notes 90 percent of U.S. bills carry traces of cocaine Is the moon a star or planet? A mole of moles New homeowner 'freaked out' when stranger took control of her security system Coffee maker ransomware NIST Phish Scale The metric system Operation Paperclip

Josh and Kurt talk about why we do the things we do. Sometimes we have to question everything. Links SLAM missile

Josh and Kurt talk about the idea of information wanting to be free. It's Christmas, we should give it what it wants! Links Hacker Manifesto

Josh and Kurt talk about how to file 1000 security flaws. One is easy, scale is hard.

Josh and Kurt talk about how to report one security flaw

Josh and Kurt talk about bug bounties

Josh and Kurt talk about if SMS 2 factor auth is better than no 2FA Links Cyber deepfaked their host

Josh and Kurt talk about modern TLS certificate trust

Josh and Kurt talk about why it's a horrible idea to roll your own crypto or auth

Josh and Kurt talk about vulnerability response. What is it, what does it mean, how does it work

Josh and Kurt talk about the switch from 16 to 32 to 64 bit and even the changes from Intel to ARM

Josh and Kurt talk about supplier compliance Links Annex A.15.1 of ISO 27001:2013 Episode 162 – SBOM with Allan Friedman

Josh and Kurt talk about backdoors in open source software

Josh and Kurt talk about the unluckiest man in the world and survivor bias Links Unluckiest man in the world

Josh and Kurt talk about video game hacking. The speedrunners are doing the best security research today Links Super Mario World RCE

Josh and Kurt talk about the safety of a 737 Links FAA says 737 is safe

Josh and Kurt talk about Apple leaking internal IP addresses. Sometimes we create our own emergencies over things that don't matter. Links Apple's internal IP addresses

Josh and Kurt talk about public key cryptography

Josh and Kurt talk about the OpenBSD security(8) man page and the importance of automating security Links OpenBSD security(8) page