Application Security Weekly (Audio)

Not all infosec advice is helpful. Bad advice wastes time, makes people less secure, and takes focus away from making software more secure. Bob Lord talks about his efforts to tamp down hacklore -- the security myths and mistakes that crop up in news stories and advice to users. He talks about how these myths come about, why they're harmful, and how they're related to the necessity of building sof...

Developers are adding LLMs to their code creation toolboxes, using them to assist with writing and reviewing code. Chris Wysopal talks about the security downsides of relying on LLMs and how appsec needs to adapt to dealing with more code at a faster pace. Resources https://www.veracode.com/blog/genai-code-security-report/ https://www.veracode.com/blog/ai-code-security-october-update/ https://www....

In an era dominated by AI-powered security tools and cloud-native architectures, are traditional Web Application Firewalls still relevant? Join us as we speak with Felipe Zipitria, co-leader of the OWASP Core Rule Set (CRS) project. Felipe has been at the forefront of open-source security, leading the development of one of the world's most widely deployed WAF rule sets, trusted by organizations gl...

Using OWASP SAMM to assess and improve compliance with the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is an excellent strategy, as SAMM provides a framework for secure development practices such as secure by design principles and handling vulns. Segment Resources: https://owaspsamm.org/ https://cybersecuritycoalition.be/resource/a-strategic-approach-to-product-security-with-owasp-samm/ As genAI becomes a more pop...

Open source projects benefit from support that takes many shapes. Kat Cosgrove shares her experience across the Kubernetes project and the different ways people can make meaningful contributions to it. One of the underlying themes is that code is written for other people. That means PRs need to be understandable, discussions need to be enlightening, documentation needs to be clear, and collaborati...

The MCP standard gave rise to dreams of interconnected agents and nightmares of what those interconnected agents would do with unfettered access to APIs, data, and local systems. Aaron Parecki explains how OAuth's new Client ID Metadata Documents spec provides more security for MCPs and the reasons why the behavior and design of MCPs required a new spec like this. Segment resources: https://aaronp...

For OT systems, uptime is paramount. That's a hard rule that makes maintaining, upgrading, and securing them a complex struggle. Tomas "Data" Owens and James Cotter discuss how Tennessee is tackling the organizational and technical challenges that come with hardening OT systems across the state. Those challenges range from old technology (like RS-232 over Wi-Fi!?) to limited budgets. They talk abo...

What are your favorite resources for secure code? Co-hosts John Kinsella and Kalyani Pawar talk about the reality of bringing security into a business. We talk about the role of the OWASP Top 10 and the OWASP ASVS in crafting security programs. And balance that with a discussion in what's the best use of everyone's time -- developers and appsec folks alike -- in crafting code that's secure by desi...

Secure code should be grounded more in concepts like secure by default and secure by design than by "spot the vuln" thinking. Matias Madou shares his experience in secure coding training and the importance of teaching critical thinking. He also discusses why critical thinking is so closely related to threat modeling and how LLMs can be a tool for helping developers get beyond the superficial advic...

Just how bad can things get if someone clicks on a link? Rob Allen joins us again to talk about ransomware, why putting too much attention on clicking links misses the larger picture of effective defenses, and what orgs can do to prepare for an influx of holiday-infused ransomware targeting. Segment resources https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/how-a-ransomware-gang-encrypted-nevada-gov...

Pull requests are a core part of collaboration, whether in open or closed source. GitHub has documented some of the security consequences of misconfiguring how PRs can trigger actions. But what happens when repo owners don't read the docs? Bar Kaduri and Roi Nisimi walk through their experience in reading docs, finding vulns, demonstrating exploits, and working with repo owners to improve their se...

The post quantum encryption migration is going to be a challenge, but how much of a challenge? There are several reasons why it is different from every other protocol and cypher iteration in the past. Is today's hardware up to the task? Is it just swapping out a library, or is there more to it? What is the extent of software, systems, and architecture that have to be updated or replaced to complet...

Ransomware attacks typically don't care about memory safety and dependency scanning, they often target old, unpatched vulns and too often they succeed. Rob Allen shares some of the biggest cases he's seen, what they have in common, and what appsec teams could do better to help them. Too much software still requires custom configuration to make it more secure. And too few software makers are embrac...

Interest and participation in the OWASP GenAI Security Project has exploded over the last two years. Steve Wilson explains why it was important for the project to grow beyond just a Top Ten list and address more audiences than just developers. He also talks about how the growth of AI Agents influences the areas that appsec teams need to focus on. Whether apps are created by genAI or directly use g...

Software has forever had flaws and humans have forever been finding and fixing them. With LLMs generating code, appsec has also been trying to determine how well LLMs can find flaws. Nico Waisman talks about XBOW's LLM-based pentesting, how it climbed a bug bounty leaderboard, how it uses feedback loops for better pentests, and how they handle (and even welcome!) hallucinations. In the news, using...

Dealing with vulns tends to be a discussion about prioritization. After all, there a tons of CVEs and dependencies with known vulns. It's important to figure out how to present developers with useful vuln info that doesn't overwhelm them. Francesco Cipollone shares how to redirect that discussion to focus on remediation and how to incorporate LLMs into this process without losing your focus or los...

In the news, Microsoft encounters a new cascade of avoidable errors with Entra ID, Apple improves iOS with hardware-backed memory safety, DeepSeek demonstrates the difficulty in reviewing models, curl reduces risk by eliminating code, preserving the context of code reviews, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-34...

This week, we chat with Scott Clinton, board member and co-chain of the OWASP GenAI Security Project. This project has become a massive organization within OWASP with hundreds of volunteers and thousands of contributors. This team has been cranking out new tools, reports and guidance for practitioners month after month for over a year now. We start off discussing how Scott and other leaders have m...

Up first, the ASW news of the week. At Black Hat 2025, Doug White interviews Ted Shorter, CTO of Keyfactor, about the quantum revolution already knocking on cybersecurity's door. They discuss the terrifying reality of quantum computing's power to break RSA and ECC encryption—the very foundations of modern digital life. With 2030 set as the deadline for transitioning away from legacy crypto, organi...

In this must-see BlackHat 2025 interview, Doug White sits down with Michael Callahan, CMO at Salt Security, for a high-stakes conversation about Agentic AI, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and the massive API security risks reshaping the cyber landscape. Broadcast live from the CyberRisk TV studio at Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, the discussion pulls back the curtain on how autonomous AI agents a...

The EU Cyber Resilience Act joins the long list of regulations intended to improve the security of software delivered to users. Emily Fox and Roman Zhukov share their experience education regulators on open source software and educating open source projects on security. They talk about creating a baseline for security that addresses technical items, maintaining projects, and supporting project own...

A smaller attack surface should lead to a smaller list of CVEs to track, which in turn should lead to a smaller set of vulns that you should care about. But in practice, keeping something like a container image small has a lot of challenges in terms of what should be considered minimal. Neil Carpenter shares advice and anecdotes on what it takes to refine a container image and to change an org's e...

Open source software is a massive contribution that provides everything from foundational frameworks to tiny single-purpose libraries. We walk through the dimensions of trust and provenance in the software supply chain with Janet Worthington. And we discuss how even with new code generated by LLMs and new terms like slopsquatting, a lot of the most effective solutions are old techniques. Resources...

Maintaining code is a lot more than keeping dependencies up to date. It involved everything from keeping old code running to changing frameworks to even changing implementation languages. Jonathan Schneider talks about the engineering considerations of refactoring and rewriting code, why code maintenance is important to appsec, and how to build confidence that adding automation to a migration resu...

A successful strategy in appsec is to build platforms with defaults and designs that ease the burden of security choices for developers. But there's an important difference between expecting (or requiring!) developers to use a platform and building a platform that developers embrace. Julia Knecht shares her experience in building platforms with an attention to developer needs, developer experience...