Application Security Weekly (Audio)

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...

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, an...

HTTP RFCs have evolved: A Cloudflare view of HTTP usage trends, Career Advice and Professional Development, Active Exploitation of Confluence CVE-2022-26134 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/vault-asw-7

We will provide a short introduction to OWASP SAMM, which is a flagship OWASP project allowing organizations to bootstrap and iteratively improve their secure software practice in a measurable way. Seba will explain the SAMM model, consisting of 15 security practices. Every security practice contains a set of activities, structured into 3 maturity levels. The activities on a lower maturity level a...

Service meshes create the opportunity to make security a team sport. They can improve observability and service identity. Turning monoliths into micro services sounds appealing, but maybe not every monolith needs to be broken up. We'll also talk about the maturity and design choices that go into service meshes and when a monolith should just remain a monolith. Segment Resources: https://www.solo.i...

We have a lot of questions about standards. How do standards emerge? How do standards encourage adoption? How do they stay relevant as development patterns change and security threats evolve? We have standards for web appsec (HTML, HTTP), all sorts of protocols, and all sorts of authentication (OAuth, OpenID). Learning how these standards come about can also inform how your own org documents desig...

We cover appsec news on a weekly basis, but sometimes that news is merely about the start of a new project, sometimes it's yet another example of a vuln class, and sometimes it's a topic we hope doesn't become a trend. So, what themes have we seen and where do we see them going? Here are a few headline topics that have alternately generated yays and yawns. CISA's Secure by Design and Secure by Def...

This year we've talked about vulns, clouds, breaches, presentations, and all the variations of Dev, Sec, and Ops. As we end the year, let's talk about starting things -- like starting an appsec program or an appsec career. But is there still a need for an appsec team? Or has it turned into specializations for areas like cloud security and bug bounty programs? We'll cover careers and coding, with a...

Firmware security is complex and continues to be an industry challenge. In this podcast we'll talk about the reasons firmware security remains a challenge and some best practices around platform security. Segment Resources: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2020/04/27/firmware-blind-spots/ https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2020/09/28/hardware-security-challenges/ https://darkreading.com/application-se...

In the rapidly evolving landscape of application security, 2023 brought significant changes with the rise of generative AI tools and an increase in automated threats. In this discussion, Karl Triebes takes a deep dive into the major trends of the past year, examining their impact on the industry and shedding light on what security professionals can anticipate moving forward into 2024. This segment...

A lot of appsec conferences have presentations for appsec audiences -- but that's not often the group that's building apps. What if more developer conferences had appsec content? We talk with Josh about security from the developer's point of view, both as an audience hearing about it and as a presenter talking about it. We discuss the importance of knowing your audience and finding the hooks in se...

The categories of security tools that we're most familiar with have struggled to keep up with how modern apps are designed and what modern devs need. What if instead of being beholden to categories, we created tools that solved problems devs have today in the types of apps they build today? And what if we had more dev leadership to influence security tools as well as secure by design? What would t...

We return to discussions of OAuth and all sorts of authentication. This time around we're looking at the design of authentication protocols, the kinds of trade-offs they weigh for adoption and security, and how a standard evolves over time to keep pace with new attacks and put to rest old mistakes. Segment resources: https://fusionauth.io/docs/v1/tech/core-concepts/modes https://webauthn.wtf/ http...

It's no surprise that OT security has fared poorly over the last 30+ years. To many appsec folks, these systems have uncommon programming languages, unfamiliar hardware, and brittle networking stacks. They also tend to have different threat scenarios. Many of these systems are designed, successfully, to maintain availability. But when a port scan can freeze or crash a device, that availability see...

What if all these recommendations to shift left were more about shifting focus? It's all too easy to become preoccupied with vulns, whether figuring out how to find them earlier in the SDLC or spending time fixing them within specific number of days. Successful DevSecOps approaches can be so much more than just vulns and so much more than just tools. Sure, tools are useful for identifying known vu...

Communication is a skill that doesn't appear on top 10 lists, rarely appears as a conference topic, and doesn't appear enough on job requirements. Yet communication is one of the critical ways that security teams influence developers, convey risk, and share knowledge with others. Even our own Security Weekly site falls a little short with only a podcast category for "Training" instead of more opti...

Supply chain has been a hot topic for a few years now, but so many things we need to do for a secure supply chain aren't new at all. We'll cover SBOMs, vuln management, and putting together a secure pipeline. Segment resources: https://www.solarwinds.com/assets/solarwinds/swresources/whitepaper/2111 swi whitepaper_nextgenbuild.pdf https://next.redhat.com/project/tekton-chains/ https://tekton.dev/...

The majority of attacks are now automated, with a growing number of attacks targeting business logic via APIs, which is unique to every organization. This shift makes traditional signature-based defenses insufficient to stop targeted business logic attacks on their own. In this discussion, Karl Triebes shares how flaws in business logic design can leave applications and APIs open to attack and wha...

Zed Attack Proxy is an essential tool for web app pentesting. The project just recently moved from OWASP to the Secure Software Project. Hear about the challenges of running an OSS security project, why Simon got involved in the first place, and why successful projects are about more than just code. Segment Resources: - https://www.zaproxy.org/  - https://softwaresecurityproject.org/blog/welcoming...

Check out this interview from the ASW Vault, hand picked by main host Mike Shema! This segment was originally published on January 10, 2022. There's an understandable focus on "shift left" in modern DevOps and appsec discussions. So what does it take to broaden what we call appsec into something effective for modern apps, whether they're on the web, mobile, or cloud? We'll talk about moving on fro...

We go deep on LLMs and generative AIs to shine a light on areas that security leaders should focus on. There are technical concerns like prompt injection and access controls, and privacy concerns in training and usage. But there are also areas where security tools are starting to address these concerns as well as areas where security tools are adopting AI themselves. We'll share where we see AI sh...

Two featured interviews from this year's Black Hat. In the news, Discord.io ceases to be, Azure AD breach to get scrutiny from the CSRB, Zoom's AI stumbles show security concerns, model confusion attacks, a look at how far we have -- and haven't -- come with XSS flaws, an approachable article on AI, and more! Visit https://securityweekly.com/asw  for all the latest episodes! Follow us on Twitter: ...

A key part of modern appsec is communication. From interpersonal skills for fostering collaborations to presentation skills for delivering a message, the ability to tell a story and engage an audience is a skill that doesn't appear on top ten lists and that doesn't come up in secure coding checklists. Josh shares his path to becoming a presenter on technical topics, including stumbles he's made al...

Mature shops should be looking to a security architecture process to help scale their systems and embrace security by design. We talk about what it means to create a security architecture process, why it's not just another security review, and why it requires security to dig into engineering. Segment Resources: - https://www.lacework.com/ciso-boardbook/ciso/merritt-baer Zap gets a jolt of new supp...

Identity isn't new, but we do have new ways of presenting and protecting identity with things like payment wallets and verifiable credentials. But we also have identity in surprising places -- like cars. We'll answer some questions like: - Why do we even have identities in cars? - What else is your car connected to? - How should devs be thinking about security in this space? In the news segment, Z...