Open Source Security

Josh and Kurt talk about a tweet from @kmcquade3 asking the question "What's a concept in security that is generally accepted as true but is actually bull%$#*?" How many of the replies make sense? Most of them do. We go over some of the best replies as fast as we can. Show Notes The tweet that started it all Mark Loveless Mark Manning Richard (Dick) Brooks @ImbecillicusRex What Train Have We Got?...

Josh and Kurt talk about leap seconds. Every time there's a leap second, things break. Facebook wants to get rid of them because they break computers, but Google found a clever way to keep leap seconds without breaking anything. Corner cases are hard, security is often just one huge corner case. There are lessons we can learn here. Show Notes How and why the leap second affected Cloudflare DNS Fac...

Josh and Kurt talk about Microsoft creating a policy of not allowing anyone to charge for open source in their app store. This policy was walked back quickly, but it raises some questions about how fair or unfair open source really is. It's mostly unfair to developers if you look at the big picture. Show Notes Syft Grype Microsoft bans and unbans open source Tidelift survey Bruce Perens - What com...

Josh and Kurt talk about PyPI mandating two factor authentication for the top 1% of projects. It feels like a simple idea, but it's not when you start to think about it. What problems does 2FA solve? How common are these attacks? What are the second and third order effects of mandating 2FA? This episode should have something for everyone on all sides of this discussion to violently disagree with....

Josh and Kurt talk about their very silly GPG key management from the past. This is sadly a very true story that details how both Kurt and Josh protected their GPG keys. Josh's setup is like something out of a very bad spy novel. It was very over the top for a key that really didn't matter. Show Notes XKCD signed email Shire calendar Guardian editors destroy Snowden laptop

Josh and Kurt talk about the challenge of dealing with vulnerabilities at a large scale. We tend to treat every vulnerability equally when they are not equal at all. Some are trees we have to pay very close attention to, and some are part of a larger forest that can't be treated as individual vulnerabilities. We often treat risk as a binary measurement instead of a sliding scale. Show Notes gsd.id...

Josh and Kurt talk about what the actual purpose of signing artifacts is. This is one of those spaces where the chain of custody for signing content is a lot more complicated than it sometimes seems to be. Is delivering software over https just as good as using a detached signature? How did we end up here, what do we think the future looks like? This episode will have something for everyone to com...

Josh and Kurt talk about the security of employees leaving jobs. Be it a voluntary departure or in the context of the current layoffs we see, what are the security implications of having to remove access for one or more people departing their job? Show Notes Tesla Layoffs Coinbase layoffs

Josh  and  Kurt  talk about a funny GitHub reply that notified 400,000 people. It's fun to laugh at this, but it's an easy open to discussing alert fatigue and why it's important to be very mindful of our communications. Show Notes GitHub 400K notifications Hacker News thread Reddit user TV Bluetooth

Josh  and  Kurt  talk about containers. There are a lot of opinions around what type of containers is best. Back when it all started there were only huge distro sized containers. Now we have a world with many different container types and sizes. Is one better? Show Notes Programming in the Apocalypse Bob Diachenko Paranoids Podcast

Josh and Kurt talk about a recent OpenSSF issue that asks the question how many open source maintainers should a project have that's "healthy"? Josh did some research that shows the overwhelming majority of packages have one maintainer. What does that mean? Show Notes OpenSSF TAC Issue 101

Josh and Kurt talk about the whole work from home debate. It seems like there are a lot of very silly excuses why working from home is bad. We've both been working from home for a long time and have a chat about the topic. There's not much security in this one, but it is a fun discussion. Show Notes Boris Johnson blames cheese Apple and WFH

Josh and Kurt talk about a fake 7-Zip security report. It's pretty clear that everyone is running open source all the time. We end on some thoughts around what SBOM is good for, and who should be responsible for them. Show Notes Probably fake 7-Zip

Josh  and  Kurt  talk to Adam Shostack about his new book "Threats: What Every Engineer Should Learn From Star Wars". We discuss some of the lessons and threats in the Star Wars universe, it's an old code I hear. We also discuss if Star Wars is a better than Star Trek for teaching security (it probably is). It's a fun conversation and sounds like an amazing book. Show Notes Adam Shostack Adam's We...

Josh and Kurt talk about the Google Project Zero blog post about 0day vulnerabilities in 2021. There were a lot more than ever before, but why? Part of the challenge is the whole industry is expanding while a lot of our security technologies are not. When the universe around you is expanding but you're staying the same size, you are actually shrinking. Show Notes Google Project Zero blog post Appl...

Josh  and  Kurt  talk about a survey about a TuxCare patch management and vulnerability detection. Sometimes our security bubble makes us forget what it's like in the real world for the people who keep our infrastructure running. Patching isn't always immediate, automation doesn't fix everything, and accepting risk is very important. Show Notes State of Enterprise Vulnerability Detection and Patch...

Josh  and  Kurt  talk about a lot of security vulnerabilities in this month's Patch Tuesday. There's also a new Git vulnerability. This sparks the age old question of how fast to patch? The answer isn't binary, the right answer is whatever works best for you, not what someone tells you is best. Show Notes Patch Tuesday Git security update

Josh  and  Kurt  talk about hackers using emergency data requests to gain access to sensitive data. The argument that somehow backdoors can be protected falls under this problem. We don't yet have the technical or policy protections in place to actually protect this data. We also explain why this zlib issue got a 2018 CVE ID in 2022. Show Notes Hackers using fake emergency data requests CVE-2018-2...

  Josh and Kurt talk about the binary nature of security. Many of our ideas are yes or no, there's not much in the middle. The conversation ends up derailed due to a Twitter thread about pinning dependencies. This gives you an idea how contentious of a topic pinning is. The final takeaway is not to let security turn into your identity, it ends up making a mess. Show Notes Josh's Twitter thread How...

  Josh and Kurt talk about the latest NPM backdoored package. It feels like this keeps happening. We talk about why this is and why it's probably OK. Kurt fixes Linus' Law, in open source the superpower isn't bugs are shallow (they're not), the superpower is security bugs in open source can't be ignored. Show Notes node-ipc protestware

Josh and Kurt talk about Microsoft accidentally letting us find out about ads in file explorer. Changing your clocks sucks. And touch on some of the security implications of the Russian invasion and sanctions. There are a lot of security lessons we can all learn. Mostly what not to do. Show Notes Ads in Windows Filemanager Russia running out of storage Russia threatens to nationalize industry Onag...

Josh and Kurt talk about the Linux Kernel Dirty Pipe security vulnerability. This bug is an amazing combination of amazing complexity, incredible simplicity, and a little bit of luck. The discovery is amazing, the analysis is enlightening. There's almost no way a bug like this could be found outside of open source. Show Notes Dirty Pipe Writeup

Josh and Kurt talk about the challenges of security at scale. Specifically we focus on why a lot of security starts to fall apart once you have to do something more than a few times. There's a lot of new thinking we need to push security forward. Show Notes Stable Linux Kernel and Machine Learning

Josh  and  Kurt  talk about SBOMs. Not what they are, there's plenty about that. We talk about why everyone keeps claiming they're super important, and why we're starting to see some people question if we really need them. SBOMs are part of a future that's still being invented. Show Notes Questioning SBOMs Rezilion Log4j diagram David A Wheeler on CII Badges Using open source is communism

Josh and Kurt talk about the Coinbase Super Bowl ad. It was a QR code, lots of security people were aghast at how many people scanned the QR code. The reality is scanning QR codes isn't dangerous. What other security advice just won't go away? Show Notes Coinbase Ad Kurt's Twitter question QR code parking scam Mossad or not Mossad Kurt's talk