Application Security Weekly (Audio)

Mobile applications have unique risks and threat models compared to server-side applications and infrastructure. Consequently, they need different strategies to ensure their business logic and workflows well secured. We'll dive into some of these defense-in-depth strategies and why they are important to mobile applications. Securing workflows goes beyond input validation and pattern matching suspi...

SquidBleed reveals another vuln that's been lurking for decades, but its real lesson is in managing an attack surface. Regardless of whatever programming language you use, removing code is one of the best security steps you can take, followed by changing default configs to turn off uncommon features and ancient protocols. The Linux kernel's removal of strncpy is another example of managing attack...

Appsec has seen machine identities from daemons and processes to services, microservices, and cloud accounts. And now we have agents. Ev Kontsevoy talks about what it means to have engineers and agents interacting in an environment, and why a focus on actions can be more effective than roles. One of the biggest challenges in securing agents along with all of the other identities that organizations...

Agents and LLMs are creating and reviewing code. They're a new tool to help developers write software and they're a new abstraction layer for expressing what code should do. But if we're focused on determining whether code is secure, where do we focus our attention on ensuring a secure outcome? Matias Madou talks about the challenges of finding metrics to help answer these questions. We walk throu...

Most AppSec teams are working through more findings than their teams can validate. SAST surfaces thousands of potential issues. DAST generates alert volume that outpaces triage capacity. Somewhere in that output are the vulnerabilities that matter, the ones that are actually exploitable in production. This conversation explores why automated testing often stops short of the hardest part of the job...

We dedicate an episode to catching up on appsec news with Kalyani Pawar. We see parsing problems that led to the BadHost vuln, which exposed lots of LLMs, MCPs, and agents to potential compromise. We wonder where to look for security education and practice as the camaraderie of the CTF community becomes infiltrated by LLMs. We talk about the tradeoffs in trust between using public packages vs. hav...

We showcase recordings from this year's RSAC. At RSAC Conference 2026, Scott Clinton, Co-Chair and co-founder of the OWASP GenAI Security Project, shares insights from the project's latest research, including new landscape guides and evolving approaches to securing generative and agentic AI systems. The conversation explores critical gaps in GenAI data security, the rise of AI-assisted development...

This year has been a dichotomy of established secure design fundamentals and burgeoning chaos of LLM-driven vuln discovery. Keith Hoodlet returns to share his latest observations on what the recent news about Mythos, models, and harnesses means for appsec. He walks through the problems of misalignment, the potential development doom that looms behind a volume of vulns, and what modern code creatio...

If you have to ditch your entire appsec strategy because you expect 2026 to bring more vulns more quickly, then you probably didn't have a good strategy in the first place. Rob Allen shares how the mentality of "assume breach" doesn't have to be a defeatist attitude and can instead be a way to change a catastrophic breach into a more contained one. We also talk about proactive security and what an...

Speed is the most common theme among developers and appsec teams working with LLMs and agents, from trying to keep up with patterns for deploying agents to dealing with more code faster to how the latest models impact code quality and security. The OWASP GenAI Project is helping organizations keep up with the speed of those changes and engaging the appsec community for sharing effective ways to ke...

Portswigger's list of web hacking techniques is a long-running celebration of curiosity and research from the web hacking community. James Kettle shares his thoughts on the entries from 2025 and how he expects LLMs and agents to influence what the list will look like for next year. He also shares some insights on using LLMs for his own blackbox research, giving us a peek into the work he'll be sha...

Red team exercises set goals to see if a particular outcome can be accomplished through a simulated attack, but the ultimate outcome should be educating the org about how to improve tools and processes that make attacks more difficult to succeed. Gwyddon "Data" Owen shares his experience building a red team, creating an exercise, and leveraging the results to improve security. And while the adopti...

It's one thing to write secure code, it's another to release it into the wild. That code needs to be designed, built, tested, released, and maintained. Farshad Abasi and Cameron Walters explain how the OWASP Secure Pipeline Verification Standard picks up from where ASVS left off, how it complements other supply chain security efforts like SLSA, and why they updated it with explicit coverage for AI...

Security problems aren't changing very much even though security teams are. We catch up on the implications of the Claude Code source leak, the very human lessons from the axios NPM compromise, and what secure design looks like when it involves agents, humans, or both. AppSec has always celebrated interesting and impactful vulns. And LLMs are now a favored tool for finding flaws. We shouldn't forg...

The future of secure software is going through a mix of skills expected of humans and skills files created for LLMs. We might even posit that appsec as a discipline will fade (and that might not even be a bad thing!). Keith Hoodlet describes the skills he was looking for in building teams of security researchers and why there's still an emphasis on the ability to learn about and understand how sof...

So much of appsec's efforts can be consumed by vuln management and a race to patch security flaws. But that's more a symptom of the ease of scanning and the volume of CVEs. Erik Nost walks through the principles behind proactive security, why the concept sounds familiar to secure by design, and why organizations still struggle with creating effective practices for visibility. Resources https://www...

What happens when secure coding guidance goes stale? What happens LLMs write code from scratch? Mark Curphy walks us through his experience updating documentation for writing secure code in Go and recreating one of his own startups. One of the themes of this conversation is how important documentation is, whether it's intended for humans or for prompts to LLMs. Importantly, LLMs don't innovate on...

Medical devices are a special segment of the IoT world where availability and patient safety are paramount. Tamil Mathi explains why many devices need to fail open -- the opposite of what traditional appsec approaches might initially think -- and what makes threat modeling these devices interesting and unique. He also covers how to get started in this space, from where to learn hardware hacking ba...

As more developers turn to LLMs to generate code, more appsec teams are turning to LLMs to conduct security code reviews. One of the biggest themes in all the discussion around LLMs, agents, and code is speed -- more code created faster. James Wickett shares why speed continues to pose a challenge to appsec teams and why that's often because teams haven't invested enough in foundational appsec pri...

Journalists put a lot of effort into collecting information and protecting their sources, but everyone can benefit from having a digital environment that's more secure and more privacy protecting. Runa Sandvik shares her experience working with journalists and targeted groups to craft plans for how they use their devices and manage their information. And she also makes the point that the burden of...

A major premise of appsec is figuring out effective ways to answer the question, "What security flaws are in this code?" The nature of the question doesn't really change depending on who or what wrote the code. In other words, LLMs writing code really just means there's mode code to secure. So, what about using LLMs to find security flaws? Just how effective and efficient are they? We talk with Ad...

When it comes to agents and MCPs, the interesting security discussion isn't that they need strong authentication and authorization, but what that authn/z story should look like, where does it get implemented, and who implements it. Dan Moore shares the useful parallels in securing APIs that should be brought into the world of MCPs -- especially because so many are still interacting with APIs. Reso...

Everyone is turning to LLMs to generate code, including attackers. Thus, it's no great surprise that there are now examples of malware generated by LLMs. We discuss the implications of more malware with Rob Allen and what it means for orgs that want to protect themselves from ransomware. Resources https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/voidlink-cloud-malware-shows-clear-signs-of-being-ai-g...

Supply chain security remains one of the biggest time sinks for appsec teams and developers, even making it onto the latest iteration of the OWASP Top 10 list. Paul Davis joins us to talk about strategies to proactively defend your environment from the different types of attacks that target supply chains and package dependencies. We also discuss how to gain some of the time back by being smarter a...

MongoBleed and a recent OWASP CRS bypass show how parsing problems remain a source of security flaws regardless of programming language. We talk with Kalyani Pawar about how these problems rank against the Top 25 CWEs for 2025 and what it means for relying on LLMs to generate code. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-366