Open Source Security

Josh talks to Keith Hoodlet about a research project he co-authored about the success rate of AI generated vulnerability patches. Keith has a very scientific approach to this paper and does a great job of breaking down all the data and outcomes. There isn't a lot of AI research that  takes this approach, this paper is a breath of fresh air. Keith has some pretty scary details during the discussion...

Josh chats with Jeff Matchett from Cloudsmith about a new report they put out. It has some scary looking statistics in it about how organizations are using dependencies. There are some surprising numbers in there, but the story is really one of defense in depth. There's no single thing we can do here, it's all about knowing what you have every step of the way. It's easy to say, but certainly a cha...

Josh welcomes Amanda Brock from OpenUK to chat about sovereignty, policy, open source, and a whole host of other topics. Amanda has front row seat into how sovereignty decisions can affect a county and its open source. It seems sometimes like open source is a global phenomenon, but there are always country wide considerations. This is what the OpenUK is doing in the UK. The discussion is great and...

Josh chats with Daniel and Stefan from curl about their summer of bliss. Curl stopped taking vulnerability reports for a month and nothing much happened really. Daniel and Stefan have a really pragmatic view of all the new LLM powered vulnerability detection tools. The cost of finding a vulnerability has dropped dramatically, but the cost of fixing those bugs hasn't changed. Taking some time off i...

Josh welcomes back Daniel Thompson to explain what just happened regarding vulnerability reporting and the CRA on September 11. The very first CRA requirements kicked in, but what does it really mean? Daniel explains it's not too bad. There are plenty more requirements coming, but this one feels very approachable. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecu...

Josh chats with Jaya Baloo from AISLE about their vulnerability scanner. If you follow open source vulnerabilities AISLE is a name you've seen popping up recently. They have a vulnerability scanner that is outperforming most of the existing scanners like Mythos. Jaya gives us some insight into how this all works and why they're different. We also learn about some scary new attacks that can be cond...

Josh chats with Erik Möller from the Sovereign Tech Agency about what they're doing. The Sovereign Tech Agency is doing some amazing work around funding open source maintainers and projects. Eric breaks down what they're doing, how it works, and how you can apply for funding. We even learn about some similar projects happening in the EU. Hopefully in the near future we will see the work Sovereign...

Josh chats with Paul Asadoorian about a tool he wrote called fettle and a recent report Paul published on CVEs. Fettle is a tool to help update and manage Linux systems. The big sell on this one is checking if your firmware is out of date. We then talk about a report Paul created that doesn't obsess over CVEs, but rather the vendor updates. It makes more sense to worry about advisories as those ar...

Josh chats with Erin Schnabel and Rob Nalen about a new effort from Commonhaus and HeroDevs for maintaining end of life open source. This project, the Open Source Sustainability Initiative is a clever way to bring corporations and projects together for maintenance of new and old versions of open source projects. This is pretty new territory for everyone, this project is worth keeping an eye on bec...

Josh chats with James from e18e. This is a project that is working on improving Javascript packages by cleaning up, speeding up, and leveling up the dependencies. The way the e18e project handles this work is very human open source. It's all about building up connections and trust with the package communities, which is no small effort. James fills us in on what they're doing as well as how we can...

Josh chats with Patrick Garrity about the VulnCheck State of Exploitation 1H-2026 report. Patrick explains the current trends we are seeing around vulnerabilities right now. While the number of CVEs is way up, the number of actually exploited vulnerabilities isn't growing year over year. This tells us there is a lot of FUD and hype. We also ask where are all the vulnerabilities that project Glassw...

Open Source Security welcomes Josh Corman to talk about the challenges around securing our critical infrastructure. Specifically the discussion centers around our water supplies. There are a lot of really wild things happening right now with attacks like Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon. Josh has an amazing ability to make these sort of discussions easy to understand without spreading FUD. Josh also...

Josh welcomes Josh Marpet for a discussion about abandoned open source packages. Josh Marpet has a foundation called Value Chain Risk Institute that has a report discussion how to start measuring if an open source package might be abandoned. There's a lot of data, but not a lot of groups using that data to help make informed decisions about using open source. VCRI is one of those places that's sta...

Josh welcomes Mo Duffy from Red Hat to chat about project Lightwell. The idea is to leverage the resources and understanding Red Hat has built up over the years to help deal with the deluge of vulnerability reports that are overwhelming open source projects. Mo does a really good job of explaining why this is fundamentally a people problem, not a technology problem. But it's a people problem we ca...

Josh chats with Lori Lorusso and Niko Matsakis about the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund. This is a new project the Rust Foundation has create to help fund Rust maintainers. It's a great discussion where Lori and Niko cover all the ways they expect to fund the maintainers which is never as easy as one initially expects. Funding open source is a huge topic right now, it sounds like the Rust Founda...

Josh chats with Allan Friedman about all things Bill of Materials. Allan did a ton of work to help turn SBOM into what it is today. He has many thoughts and ideas around the new types of BOMs, a concept he's calling the OmniBOM. Allan is always fun to chat with and he brings a ton of knowledge and advice. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2...

Josh welcomes Jordi Boggiano the lead maintainer of Composer and Packagist to explain the truckload of security features they've recently added. Packagist is the PHP package registry, Composer is the dependency manager for PHP. Recently the people behind these projects have added a number of security features that will improve the security of the entire ecosystem. Jordi explains it all to us and g...

Josh welcomes Mike Milinkovich and Thabang Mashologu from the Eclipse Foundation to talk about their new managed Open VSX registry. This is the first open source package registry to create a commercial operation for large company users to help fund the registry. We discuss how we got here, what's actually going on, and why this commercial approach is working. Everyone knew this day would come, and...

Josh welcomes back François Proulx to talk about the absolute madness in the CI/CD universe right now. We also learn about François' new project SmokedMeat which is a tool to help you hack your own CI/CD. When Josh spoke to François a year ago, the world was a very different place than it is today. François has a ton of knowledge about how we got here and what we can do moving forward. Boost Secur...

Josh chats with Sal Kimmich about the current state of everything, and what we can expect next. Sal has some incredible insight into what we can expect to see due to the current wave of security bugs and incidents. There are some new features we will need in both our hardware and software to ward off the state of things. Since those features are years away, what we need in the short term is shorin...

Josh talks to Casey Ellis about why vulnerability disclosure is so hard, and also so important. Casey is one of the best in this space having been a Bugcrowd founder. There are few people with more experience and insight into how a security vulnerability should be handled, and why the explosion of AI is making all this much harder than it's ever been before. While finding vulnerabilities is easy,...

Josh talks to Hans-Christoph Steiner about F-Droid, the Free and Open Source Android App Repository. The way F-Droid works looks a lot like a Linux distribution which has some interesting security challenges, but also some great security benefits. Hans walks us through the current state of open app repositories and also what the future currently looks like. There are more open phones than ever bef...

Josh talks to Kat Cosgrove about a how companies should be treating open source more like their critical infrastructure than free stuff. Kat has a ton of knowledge about how the interactions between companies and open source communities can work well, or not work at all. Kat's time on the Kubernetes Release Team. We touch on how a project like Kubernetes is super successful, while another, Ingress...

Josh and David finish up the disaster recovery and emergency planning trilogy. In this one David tells us how to test the plan he told us how to build in the last episode. There are some great ideas in this one about how to test the process not the people. How to construct the plan, and even some tips to go from a plan to some actual real world testing. It's another episode filled with great and p...

Josh has a discussion with Vlad-Stefan Harbuz about the Open Source Pledge as well as his recent FOSDEM talk. The Open Source Pledge is all about trying to build a sustainable universe for open source maintainers. This ties into Vlad's FOSDEM talk which was all about the challenge of just knowing what open source you are using. The importance of trying to make open source sustainable is a really i...