Application Security Weekly (audio)

A lot of AI security boils down to the boring, but important, software security topics that appsec teams have been dealing with for decades. Niv Braun explains the distinctions between AI-related and AI-specific security as we avoid the FUD and hype of genAI to figure out where appsec teams can invest their time. He notes that data scientists have been working with ML and sensitive data sets for a long time, and it's good to have more scrutiny on what controls should be present to protect that data. This segment is sponsored by Noma Security. Visit https://securityweekly.com/noma to learn more about them! An open source security project forks in response to license changes (and an echo of how we've been here before), car hacking via spectacularly insecure web apps, hacking a synth via spectacularly cool MIDI messages, cookie parsing problems, the RANsacked paper of 100+ LTE/5G vulns found from fuzzing, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://security

What’s in store for appsec in 2025? Sure, there'll be some XSS and SQL injection, but what about trends that might influence how appsec teams plan? Cody Scott shares five cybersecurity and privacy predictions and we take a deep dive into three of them. We talk about finding value to appsec from AI, why IoT and OT need both programmatic and technical changes, and what the implications of the next XZ Utils attack might be. Segment resources: https://www.forrester.com/blogs/predictions-2025-cybersecurity-risk-privacy/ Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-314

There's a pernicious myth that developers don't care about security. In practice, they care about code quality. What developers don't care for is ambiguous requirements. Ixchel Ruiz shares her experience is discussing software designs, the challenges in prioritizing dev efforts, and how to help open source project maintainers with their issue backlog. Segment resources: https://github.com/ossf/scorecard https://www.commonhaus.org/ https://www.hackergarten.net/ Design lessons from PyPI's Quarantine capability, effective ways for appsec to approach phishing, why fishshell is moving to Rust component by component (and why that's a good thing!), what behaviors the Cyber Trust Mark might influence, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-313

All appsec teams need quality tools and all developers benefit from appsec guidance that's focused on meaningful results. Greg Anderson shares his experience in bringing the OWASP DefectDojo project to life and maintaining its value for over a decade. He reminds us that there are tons of appsec teams with low budgets and few members that need tools to help them bring useful insights to developers. Segment Resources: https://owasp.org/www-project-defectdojo/ Three-quarters of CISOs surveyed reported being "overwhelmed" by the growing number of tools and their alerts: https://www.darkreading.com/cloud-security/cisos-throwing-cash-tools-detect-breaches As many as one-fifth of all cybersecurity alerts turn out to be false positives. Among 800 IT professionals surveyed, just under half of them stated that approximately 40% of the alerts they receive are false positives: https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/97260-one-fifth-of-cybersecurity-alerts-are-false-positives 91% of organizations knowingly released v

Practices around identity and managing credentials have improved greatly since the days of infosec mandating 90-day password rotations. But those improvements didn't arise from a narrow security view. Hannah Sutor talks about the importance of balancing security with usability, the importance of engaging with users when determining defaults, and setting an example for transparency in security disclosures. Segment resources https://youtu.be/ydg95R2QKwM Curl's oldest bug yet, RCPs (and more!) from AWS re:Invent, possible controls for NPM's malware proliferation, insights and next steps on protecting top 500 packages from the Census III report, the flawed design choice that made Microsoft's OTP (successfully) brute-forceable, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-311

We do our usual end of year look back on the topics, news, and trends that caught our attention. We covered some OWASP projects, the ongoing attention and promises of generative AI, and big events from the XZ Utils backdoor to Microsoft's Recall to Crowdstrike's outage. Segment resources https://prods.ec https://owasp.org/www-project-spvs/ https://genai.owasp.org/resource/owasp-top-10-for-llm-applications-2025/ https://securitychampions.owasp.org/ https://deadliestwebattacks.com/appsec/2024/11/14/ai-and-llms-asw-topic-recap https://www.scworld.com/podcast-episode/3017-infosec-myths-mistakes-and-misconceptions-adrian-sanabria-asw-279 Curl and Python (and others) deal with bad vuln reports generated by LLMs, supply chain attack on Solana, comparing 5 genAI mistakes to OWASP's Top Ten for LLM Applications, a Rust survey, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-310

Observability is a lot more than just sprinkling printf statements throughout a code base. Adriana Villela explains principles behind logging, traceability, and metrics and how the OpenTelemetry project helps developers gather this useful information. She also provides suggestions on starting logging from scratch, how to avoid information overload, and how engaging users about their experience with solutions like OpenTelemetry makes for better software -- a lesson that appsec teams can apply to paved roads and security guardrails. Segment Resources: https://opentelemetry.io https://cncf.io https://adri-v.medium.com/ Fuzzing barcodes and getting projects onboarded with fuzzers, using AI to guide fuzzers, using AI to combat scammers, using CWEs for something, using malicious comments to ban repos, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-309

This week's interview dives deep into the state of biometrics with two Forrester Research analysts! This discussion compares and contrasts regional approaches to biometrics; examine the security challenges and benefits of their implementation; and reveal how biometrics holds the keys to a range of engagement models of the future. Andras Cser dives into the technical end of things and explains how biometrics can be resilient to attack. We can't replace our fingerprints or faces, but as Andras explains, there's no need to, thanks to how biometrics actually work. Then, Enza takes us through the latest on privacy in biometrics - a concern for both consumers, and businesses tasked with complying with privacy regulations and avoiding costly fines. Finally, get a sneak peek into the upcoming Forrester Security & Risk Summit. Whether you're an industry professional or just curious about the implications of biometrics, this episode delivers insights you won't want to miss! This week, in the Application Security Ne

In this week's interview, Melinda Marks' joins us to discuss her latest research. Her recent report Modernizing Application Security to Scale for Cloud-Native Development delves into many aspects and trends affecting AppSec as it matures, particularly in cloud-first organizations. We also discuss the fuzzy line between "cloud-native" AppSec and everything else that refuses to disappear, particularly for organizations that weren't born cloud-native and still have legacy workloads to worry about. Integrating security into the SDLC and CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (IaC) trends, best of breed vs platform, and other aspects of AppSec get discussed as well! This week, in the Application Security News, we spend a lot of time on some recent vulnerabilities. We take this opportunity to talk about how to determine whether or not a vulnerability is worth a critical response. Can AI fully automate DevSecOps Governance? Adrian has his reservations, but JLK is bullish. Is it bad that 70% of DevSecOps profession

After spending a decade working for appsec vendors, Grant McKracken wanted to give something back. He saw a gap in the market for free or low-cost services for smaller organizations that have real appsec needs, but not a lot of means to pay for it. He founded DarkHorse, who offers VDPs and bug bounties to organizations of all sizes for free, or for as low of cost as possible. While not a non-profit, the company's goal is to make these services as cheap as possible to increase accessibility for smaller or more budget-constrained organizations. The company has also introduced the concept of "fractional pentesting", access to cyber talent when and how you need it, based on what you can afford. This implies services beyond just offensive security, something we'll dive deeper into in the interview. We don't see DarkHorse ever competing with the larger Bug Bounty platforms, but rather providing services to the organizations too small for the larger platforms to sell to. Microsoft delays Recall AGAIN, Project Zero u

Better TLS implementations with Rust, fuzzing, and managing certs, appsec lessons from the everlasting transition to IPv6, LLMs for finding vulns (and whether fuzzing is better), and more! Also check out this presentation from BSides Knoxville that we talked about briefly, https://youtu.be/DLn7Noex_fc?feature=shared Generative AI has been the talk of the technology industry for the past 18+ months. Companies are seeing its value, so generative AI budgets are growing. With more and more AI agents expected in the coming years, it’s essential that we are securing how consumers interact with generative AI agents and how developers build AI agents into their apps. This is where identity comes in. Shiven Ramji, President of Customer Identity Cloud at Okta, will dive into the importance of protecting the identity of AI agents and Okta’s new security tools revealed at Oktane that address some of the largest issues consumers and businesses have with generative AI right now. Segment Resources: https://www.okta.com/okta

Building cloud native apps doesn't mean you're immune to dealing with legacy systems. Cloud services have changed significantly over the last decade, both in the security controls available to them and the sheer volume of services that CSPs provide. Scott Piper shares some history of cloud security, the benefits of account separation, and how ratcheting security helps orgs stay on a paved path. Segment resources: https://www.wiz.io/blog/a-security-community-success-story-of-mitigating-a-misconfiguration http://flaws.cloud http://flaws2.cloud https://promptairlines.com Get a free demo of Wiz! Flaws that arise from inconsistent parsing of JSON and email addresses, CISA's guide to bad software practices, abusing a security disclosure process to take over a WordPress plugin, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-304

Zed Attack Proxy has been a crucial web app testing tool for decades. It's also had a struggle throughout 2024 to obtain funding that would enable the tool to add more features while remaining true to its open source history. Simon Bennetts, founder of ZAP, and Ori Bendet from Checkmarx update us on that journey, share some exploration of LLM fuzzing that ZAP has been working on, and what the future looks like for this well-loved project. Segment Resources: https://www.zaproxy.org/blog/2024-09-24-zap-has-joined-forces-with-checkmarx/ https://www.zaproxy.org/blog/2024-09-30-improving-fuzzing-payloads-for-llms-with-fuzzai/ https://checkmarx.com/press-releases/checkmarx-joins-forces-with-zap-to-supercharge-dynamic-application-security-testing-dast-for-the-enterprise-and-enhance-community-growth/ KICS: https://github.com/Checkmarx/kics 2MS: https://github.com/Checkmarx/2ms The many lessons to take away from a 24-year old flaw in glibc and the mastery in crafting an exploit in PHP, changing a fuzzer's configu

More remote car control via web interfaces, an RCE in CUPS, Microsoft reduces attack surface, migrating to memory safety, dealing with dependency confusion, getting rid of password strength calculators, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-301

APIs are essential to modern application architectures, driving rapid development, seamless integration, and improved user experiences. However, their widespread use has made them prime targets for attackers, especially those deploying sophisticated bots. When these bots exploit business logic, they can cause considerable financial and reputational damage. In this discussion, David Holmes offers insights into the latest trends in API and bot attacks and provides strategies to defend against these threats. Segment Resources: The Economic Impact of API and Bot Attacks: https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/the-economic-impact-of-api-and-bot-attacks/ The True Cost of API Insecurity and Bot Attacks in 2024: https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/webinars/the-true-cost-of-api-insecurity-and-bot-attacks-in-2024/ This segment is sponsored by Imperva. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/imperva to learn more about them! In the news, fuzzing network traffic in OpenWRT, parsing pro

When a conference positioned as a day of security for developers has to be canceled due to lack of interest from developers, it's important to understand why there was so little interest and why appsec should reconsider its approach to awareness. Dustin Lehr discusses how appsec can better engage and better deliver security concepts in a way that makes developers not only feel like their time is well used, but that the content appeals to them. Segment Resources: - The Security Champion Program Success Guide -- A free guide that includes all steps necessary to build a successful security champion program, with real-world recommendations and examples: https://securitychampionsuccessguide.org/ - Let's Talk Software Security -- A free global virtual community where we host monthly open discussions on appsec topics: https://www.meetup.com/lets-talk-software-security/ In the news, a takeover of the MOBI TLD for $20, configuring an LLM for a CTF, firmware flaw in an SSD, Microsoft talks kernel resilience, six truths

Considerations in paying down tech debt, make Rust work on bare metal, ECDSA side-channel in Yubikeys, trade-offs in deploying SSO quickly, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-298

Check out this interview from the ASW Vault, hand picked by main host Mike Shema! This segment was originally published on May 9, 2023. What does software resilience mean? Why is status quo application security unfit for the modern era of software? How can we move from security theater to security chaos engineering? This segment answers these questions and more. Segment Resources: Book -- https://securitychaoseng.com Blog -- https://kellyshortridge.com/blog/posts/ Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/vault-asw-13

IoT devices are notorious for weak designs, insecure implementations, and a lifecycle that mostly ignores patching. We look at external factors that might lead to change, like the FCC's cybersecurity labeling for IoT. We explore the constraints that often influence poor security on these devices, whether those constraints are as consequential given modern appsec practices, and what the opportunities are to make these devices more secure for everyone. Segment resources: https://www.fcc.gov/document/cybersecurity-labeling-program-internet-things-iot-products Research by Orange Tsai into Apache HTTPD's architecture reveals several vulns, NCC Group shows techniques for hacking IoT devices with Sonos speakers, finding use cases for WebAssembly, Slack's AI leaks data, DARPA wants a future of Rust, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-297

This week, Jeff Pollard and Allie Mellen join us to discuss the fallout and lessons learned from the CrowdStrike fiasco. They explore the reasons behind running in the kernel, the challenges of software quality, and the distinction between a security incident and an IT incident. They also touch on the need to reduce the attack surface and the importance of clear definitions in the cybersecurity industry. The conversation explores the need for a product security revolution and the importance of transparency and trust in security vendors. As development cycles shorten and more responsibilities shift to developers, application security (AppSec) is rapidly evolving. Organizations are increasingly building mature programs that automate and enhance AppSec, moving beyond manual processes. In this discussion, we explore how organizations are adapting their AppSec practices, highlighting the challenges and milestones encountered along the way. Key topics include the integration of security into the development lifecyc