As I see how search engines are incorporating LLMs, it makes me all the more eager to see their capabilities cross into the physical world.

I’d love to be able to walk into a room and just tap a wall to trigger full-room illumination through an agentic interaction.

And just imagine having a more complex agent, like if I slide my finger vertically, then the movement could be semantically translated into the amount of illumination I’m in the mood for. Plus, in the real world you have axes and dimensions, so it’d be possible to apply any of this learning to accommodate horizontal human-digital expressions.

Training is probably straightforward, to the point where I could leave lights on the entire time. In fact, I’ll probably have to so I can train a model to know the difference between a tap that means I want illumination and a tap that means I want to temporarily halt a photon-generating device. This is actually advantageous since by default I anticipate I’ll want to be able to see. So this approach will be more resilient to darkness and when the LLM worries I might hallucinate and see things in the dark.

Currently budgeting the cloud computing resources I’ll need to back a Raspberry Pi for a mockup. Confident I can get a Localized Lighting Model done fairly quickly.

We ended the year in the chill of December,

Hoping that appsec wouldn’t dim to an ember.

That instead it would burn brightly and begin to enshrine,

That good security comes by default and design.

That the page count of hardening guides will start dwindling,

And that all those top ten lists are used for just kindling.

Episode 309

We once again turned our focus on developers, with Adriana Villela explaining why observability is more than a bunch of printfs and how generating useful logs helps security teams. She also noted that information overload can be expensive – both in delivering value and in the cost of storing data. We used OpenTelemetry as the reference for creating observability across different services and languages.

Episode 310

We reserved our second-to-last segment for a lookback on 2024. There was a mix of OWASP projects that gained momentum or stalled out. GenAI and LLMs remained in the usual suspects, although in 2025 we’ll be shifting more focus to where they actually provide appsec value rather than just revisit more prompt injection techniques. They’re becoming the new XSS payload trivia.

Episode 311

Finally, Hannah Sutor helped us end the year on a high note, singing the praises of useability and transparency in security. She shared her experience in changing product defaults to be more secure, the challenges in communicating changes, and the importance of understanding why different users have different needs.

At the end of the episode, I also returned to asking our guests to describe appsec in three words. Stay tuned for more discussions on designs, defaults, and maybe even some Dungeons & Dragons in 2025!

Subscribe to ASW to find these episodes and more! Also check out the November 2024 recap.

November’s ASW turned into Adrian Sanabria Weekly!

Episode 306

The month kicked off with Grant McCracken discussing bug bounties and a modern approach to pentesting. While I would still love to see the costs of fixing flaws, seeing the costs of security flaws quantified through bounties is always eye-opening. Plus, it’s always good to see other approaches to security testing that carry a more predictable budget. Now if only those bugs didn’t make it to production in the first place…

Episode 307

Melinda Marks returned to the show to talk about what modern appsec practices look like and why appsec needs to catch up to how modern apps are created. Unsurprisingly, “cloud native” comes up in the conversation, but there are important nods to orgs stuck with figuring out how to keep their legacy apps alive.

This also had a fun news segment with John Kinsella that covered everything from a very-minimum-max-critical bug to infotainment vulns to demastering pop punk like it was meant to be. (Special shout out to Adrian for keeping a music-related theme going for the show.)

Episode 308

The month wrapped up with the biometric frontiers of security, resiliency, and privacy. Adrian spoke with Andras Cser and Enza Iannopollo on the benefits of biometrics and steps to keeping them secure.

This episode also had a news segment with a ton of articles that I would have had strong reactions to, from LLMs doing everything! (lol, no) to safer C++ (positive performance, but pessimistic prospects for the language overall).

Subscribe to ASW to find these episodes and more! Also check out the October 2024 recap.