Absolute AppSec

Seth and Ken are back on the podcast this week without a guest for the first time in a month and start out with an in-depth discussion on startup life based on a recent article from TLDR;Sec. This is followed by thoughts on the recent influx of cash for Portswigger and how it will affect work and the testing space over the next few years. Finally, opinions on the recent polyfill[.io] malware attac...

Tanya Janca (@shehackspurple on X) joins Ken Johnson (@cktricky) and Seth Law (@sethlaw) for a special episode of the Absolute AppSec podcast. Tanya is currently head of education and community at Semgrep, and is a prominent info security commenter and active contributor to improving the industry for everybody through helping spread values of diversity, inclusion and kindness. Tanya has had experi...

Rahil Parikh, manager of Security Engineering and Architecture @ Policygenius, joins Seth Law and Ken Johnson for an episode of Absolute AppSec. Rahil is long-time leader in information security who's managed security teams and application security programs at a range of organizations: Policy Genius, Zinnia, the New York Times, Frame.io (now Adobe), Jet.com (Walmart), and Gotham Digital Science (A...

Absolute AppSec welcomes Alejandro Saenz to join Seth Law and Ken Johnson as a guest. Alejandro has been active in application and product security fields for over a decade, most recently working in product security for Twilio. Before that he worked as a senior application security engineer and software engineer at Softrams and as an application security consultant at nVisium. Alejandro has regula...

Charles Shirer joins Absolute AppSec for a special episode of the show. Charles has decades of experience as a pentester, threat hunter, red teamer, and security consultant. He's CEO of GlobalWave consulting, a security consulting firm that's been serving clients for over a decade. Charles is also a frequent conference speaker, online commentator, and tireless advocate for helping hackers find way...

Dustin Lehr, current director of AppSec at data integration company Fivetran, joins Seth and Ken for a special episode of Absolute AppSec. Dustin has spent years helping improve companies' security cultures industry-wide, through his work co-founding Katilyst Security which focuses on helping companies create security champion programs. Additionally, in that vein, Dustin has created The Security C...

Kyle Kelly joins Seth Law and Ken Johnson as a special guest on the Absolute AppSec podcast. Kyle is an Executive Cybersecurity Consultant at Bancsec, Inc, and Security Researcher at Semgrep, and founder of the wonderful Cramhacks newsletter. As a consultant and researcher, Kyle specializes in supply chain security, a speciality that informs the thoughts he publicizes, but even more so cramhacks r...

Bryan Schmidt, information security lead at Adept AI is joining Ken Johnson (@cktricky on twitter/x) and Seth Law (@Sethlaw) for a special episode of Absolute AppSec. Before Adept. AI, Bryan spent the last half decade working as a security engineering manager at, first, Flatiron Health and, later ChowNow, and he worked as a penetration tester and security consultant for that. We’ll be discussing A...

Seth and Ken return with analysis of recent research that shows LLMs exploiting known CVEs. And no, it's not completely autonomous yet. This is followed by a breakdown of DataDog's State of DevSecOps article, backing up our gut feel of current industry needs and failures.

**Video may be required**: this episode is focused on demonstrating uses of LLMs against various code. As such, listeners may want to watch the stream to see these uses rather than just listening. Also, Seth and Ken talk briefly at the beginning of the episode about a new tldr;sec project (thanks Clint!) called awesome secure defaults that lists out useful libraries and projects that are secure by...

After a week of travel, Seth and Ken return to the podcast with a breakdown of their travel experiences at multiple conferences and teaching their first Practical Secure Code Review course using LLMs to enhance the methodology. This is followed by reinforcement of code review steps including library research, a discussion of the recent XZ backdoor, and an article reviewing LLM hallucinations when...

When Ken is away, the geeks will play. Seth is joined by podcast regular Stefan Edwards (@lojikil) to catch up on his recent work around threat hunting. This progresses into a discussion on threat intelligence and what is available for applications. A recent blog post on the utility of the CVE system spurs thoughts on the usefulness of published CVEs. Finally, opinions fly on authorization issues...

Ken and Seth are back to talk about the difference and competing priorities of Application and Enterprise Security. In short, recent news contends that Enterprise or Infrastructure security is lacking, whereas Application or Product Security is in a good state. This is followed by a discussion on supply chain security tools due to a recent analysis conducted by DoyenSec comparing false positives a...

Ken and Seth return for another episode, starting out with pointers on getting into security and finding a niche, all based on a recently released Microsoft project to introduce anyone to security. This is followed by a discussion on Chinese hacking groups and recent breaches among those groups. Finally, a discussion protecting the software supply chain due to recent forking and upload of maliciou...

Seth and Ken review the recent Whitehouse report on going back to the basics for software security and vulnerabilities. Specifically, how is the use of memory unsafe languages like C and C++ affecting the overall security of the internet landscape. This include a discussion on formal verification and crocs and socks of software testing. Finally, thoughts are shared on the recent use of Hugging Fac...

Podcast viewers will be familiar with Portswigger's annual list of Web Hacking Techniques. Ken and Seth take some time to digest the list and recommend reviewing not only the top 10, but also the nominations. A discussion on the use of LLM Agents as a dynamic scanning engine for identifying vulnerabilities. If you aren't already using an LLM to help speed up your AppSec, why not? Finally, a discus...

Ken and Seth comment on their recent use of the same passwords across multiple organizations. Errr, or wait. That's administrators in some instances, according to recently published analysis from Lares. Will we ever get over passwords or are we doomed to repeat the past? In other news, GitHub Copilot may be (one of) the culprit(s) for the enshitification of code, based on a published paper from Gi...

Seth and Ken return to the podcast to talk about fraud scammers based on a recent article from Cory Doctorow and what AppSec can do to protect their apps and themselves. Crocs and Socks. The use of deep fakes to scam corporations to transfer money. Finally, a discussion on sensitive data and why it happens in APIs due to the recent news that Spoutible exposed all sorts of tokens as reported by Tro...

Ken and Seth start out with a lengthy discussion about application security jobs, training, and getting into the security space due to an article based on someone's experience moving from IT to pentesting. This is followed by possible needs for the NSA to collect commercially available browsing data. Finally, a quick hit on prompt injection and how things are moving quickly in the AI/LLM space.

Seth and Ken are back after a weeks hiatus and start by demonstrating FlowMate, a newly released Burp Extension for building context of the parameters used by an application. This is followed by in-depth analysis of Reversing Lab's State of Software Supply Chain Security Report.

Ken and Seth return to settle the age old question of whether false positives or false negatives are better when dealing with security tools. Tears are shed as stories of wasted efforts ring through on the podcasting airwaves. Maybe. Discussions on AI generated recommendations and how it _can_ be useful, but also turn out poorly. Finally, introductions on large scale vulnerability management at Gi...

Seth and Ken kick off a new year talking about recent news, including improvements in security process for software supply chains. This is followed by security predictions for 2024, including LLMs, dynamic scanning, process, and other possibilities in the near future.

David Trejo (@dtrejo@infosec.exchange) and Paul Kuliniewicz, security engineers at Chime join Seth (@sethlaw on x) and Ken (@cktricky) to discuss the ins and outs of challenges and successes in a widely recognized effective product security program. You can start reading up on the Monocle program here: https://medium.com/life-at-chime/monocle-how-chime-creates-a-proactive-security-engineering-cult...

Ken and Seth return to discuss current news. First up is a discussion about token leakage based on the recent discovery of AI tokens on Github and Cloud tokens on Hugging Face's repository. The struggles that package maintainers have with hosted data and secrets is an old problem that doesnt' have a good solution. A re-hash of the recent blogpost "Cybersecurity isn't Special" and how this also isn...

Ken and Seth decide whether the idea of security reviews are dead, spurred on by a recent blog post by Frank Wang on doing away with the current perception of reviews. This is followed by a walkthrough of the Splunk XSLT code and vulnerability for the PoC of CVE-2023-46214.