Open Source Security

Josh and Kurt talk about the UK plan to scan their country's IP space. The purpose and outcome of this isn't completely clear at this point, but we are hopeful the data can be used as a positive force. We are only going to see more programs like this as all the governments are told they have to cyber harder. Show Notes NCSC Scanning information Motherboard podcast about NCIS

Josh and Kurt talk about the recent OpenSSL nothingburger. OpenSSL got everyone whipped into a frenzy over a critical vulnerability, then changed the severity to high. The correct solution to this whole problem is to stop using a TLS library written in C, we need to be using memory safe languages. Don't migrate from OpenSSL 1 to 3, migrate from OpenSSL 1 to Rustls. Show Notes OpenSSL Blog Post Ope...

Josh and Kurt talk about Lufthansa trying to ban Airtags. This has a similar feel to all the security events where a company tries to hand waive away a security problem then having to walk back all their previous statements. There is almost always a massive imbalance between the large companies and consumers. Show Notes Lufthansa bans airtags Airtag stalking problems Lufthansa unbans airtags Cult...

Josh and Kurt talk about stories detailing tech working with multiple jobs. This raises some questions about fairness, accountability, and the future of work. As an industry we are very bad at measuring what we do, which is a problem shared with many jobs currently working from home. Show Notes Equifax surveilled 1,000 remote workers, fired 24 found juggling two jobs Business Insider 2 jobs story...

Josh and Kurt talk about ineffective security from the past we still use today. There has been a great deal of progress in the last few decades bringing us amazing products like the Flipper Zero, cameras that can peer inside locks, and even software defined radio. A great deal of security relies on people not having easy access to these cheap devices. What does this mean for the future of security...

Josh and Kurt talk about a newly rediscovered old python vulnerability. It raises a lot of questions about what was OK in 2007 vs what's OK in 2022. The issue is very complicated and has a wild story surrounding it. There is no reason to not fix this in 2022. Show Notes CVE-2007-4559 Red Hat Bug Register story Response from upstream Upstream patch ZippSlip Current upstream bug CSURF

Josh and Kurt talk about a blog post that explains there isn't really an open source software supply chain. The whole idea of open source being one thing is incorrect, open source is really a lot of little things put together. A lot of companies and organizations get this wrong. Show Notes Iliana's Twitter There is no "software supply chain" Google supply chain blog GitHub ansi_term advisory PyPI...

Josh and Kurt talk about programming language ecosystems tracking and publishing security advisory details. We are at a point in the language ecosystems where they are giving us services that have historically been reserved for operating systems. Show Notes Kelsey Hightower tweet OSS-Fuzz

Josh and Kurt talk about the Time Till Open Source Alternative blog post. The numbers probably don't mean what we think they mean anymore. A lot of modern open source is really corporate controlled. Just because something carries an open source license doesn't mean you can contribute to it. Show Notes Time Till Open Source Alternative GitHub Desktop issue 78 The Reddit Safe

Josh and Kurt talk with Josh Aas from the Internet Security Research Group about Let's Encrypt, Prossimo, and Divvi Up. A lot has changed since the last time we spoke with Josh. Let's Encrypt won, and the ISG are working on some really cool new projects. Show Notes Josh Aas Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) Let's Encrypt Episode 87 – Chat with Let's Encrypt co-founder Josh Aas New Major Fund...

Josh and Kurt talk about really weird networking bugs. Josh tells a story about his home network problems that made no sense. There was also a qt5 bug that affected wireless networks that made virtually no sense. What should count as a security vulnerability? Show Notes Resolving an unusual wifi issue Hacker News thread Global Security Database IdeaPad 5 14ARE05

Josh and Kurt talk about the recent National Defense Authorization Act that requires security vulnerabilities to be fixed. What does this mean for us, is it as bad as some people are claiming it is? It's actually not a huge deal, for most of us it's really just time to deal with product security. Show Notes The Hacker Mind The Untold Stories of Open Source H.R.7900 - National Defense Authorization...

Josh and Kurt talk to Dustin Childs about the recent ZDI Black Hat talk where they discovered the current trend of security patches not actually fixing the security problem. We talk about what this problem means. Why is it happening, and what ZDI is doing to try nudge the industry in the right direction. Show Notes Dustin Childs ZDI Sloppy Software Patches Are a 'Disturbing Trend' Zero Day Initiat...

Josh and Kurt talk about our lack of security and some of the data bias problems that can emerge. A lot of what we think is security data is really just biased data. This is OK as long as we understand the data is broken and know this is the first step in a longer journey. Show Notes Tweet about data The 6 most common types of bias when working with data Syft and Grype stars graph John Snow, Chole...

Josh and Kurt talk about a tweet from @kmcquade3 asking the question "What's a concept in security that is generally accepted as true but is actually bull%$#*?" How many of the replies make sense? Most of them do. We go over some of the best replies as fast as we can. Show Notes The tweet that started it all Mark Loveless Mark Manning Richard (Dick) Brooks @ImbecillicusRex What Train Have We Got?...

Josh and Kurt talk about leap seconds. Every time there's a leap second, things break. Facebook wants to get rid of them because they break computers, but Google found a clever way to keep leap seconds without breaking anything. Corner cases are hard, security is often just one huge corner case. There are lessons we can learn here. Show Notes How and why the leap second affected Cloudflare DNS Fac...

Josh and Kurt talk about Microsoft creating a policy of not allowing anyone to charge for open source in their app store. This policy was walked back quickly, but it raises some questions about how fair or unfair open source really is. It's mostly unfair to developers if you look at the big picture. Show Notes Syft Grype Microsoft bans and unbans open source Tidelift survey Bruce Perens - What com...

Josh and Kurt talk about PyPI mandating two factor authentication for the top 1% of projects. It feels like a simple idea, but it's not when you start to think about it. What problems does 2FA solve? How common are these attacks? What are the second and third order effects of mandating 2FA? This episode should have something for everyone on all sides of this discussion to violently disagree with....

Josh and Kurt talk about their very silly GPG key management from the past. This is sadly a very true story that details how both Kurt and Josh protected their GPG keys. Josh's setup is like something out of a very bad spy novel. It was very over the top for a key that really didn't matter. Show Notes XKCD signed email Shire calendar Guardian editors destroy Snowden laptop

Josh and Kurt talk about the challenge of dealing with vulnerabilities at a large scale. We tend to treat every vulnerability equally when they are not equal at all. Some are trees we have to pay very close attention to, and some are part of a larger forest that can't be treated as individual vulnerabilities. We often treat risk as a binary measurement instead of a sliding scale. Show Notes gsd.id...

Josh and Kurt talk about what the actual purpose of signing artifacts is. This is one of those spaces where the chain of custody for signing content is a lot more complicated than it sometimes seems to be. Is delivering software over https just as good as using a detached signature? How did we end up here, what do we think the future looks like? This episode will have something for everyone to com...

Josh and Kurt talk about the security of employees leaving jobs. Be it a voluntary departure or in the context of the current layoffs we see, what are the security implications of having to remove access for one or more people departing their job? Show Notes Tesla Layoffs Coinbase layoffs

Josh  and  Kurt  talk about a funny GitHub reply that notified 400,000 people. It's fun to laugh at this, but it's an easy open to discussing alert fatigue and why it's important to be very mindful of our communications. Show Notes GitHub 400K notifications Hacker News thread Reddit user TV Bluetooth

Josh  and  Kurt  talk about containers. There are a lot of opinions around what type of containers is best. Back when it all started there were only huge distro sized containers. Now we have a world with many different container types and sizes. Is one better? Show Notes Programming in the Apocalypse Bob Diachenko Paranoids Podcast

Josh and Kurt talk about a recent OpenSSF issue that asks the question how many open source maintainers should a project have that's "healthy"? Josh did some research that shows the overwhelming majority of packages have one maintainer. What does that mean? Show Notes OpenSSF TAC Issue 101