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November turned the podcast to a film noir narrative.
A lot of appsec conferences have presentations for appsec audiences – but that’s not often the group that’s building apps. What if more developer conferences had #appsec content? We talked with Josh Goldberg, an Open Source developer, about security from the developer’s point of view, both as an audience hearing about it and as a presenter talking about it. We discussed the importance of knowing your audience and finding the hooks in security tools and topics that resonate with developers.
We had another repeat guest with Karl Triebes, who talked about what 2023 brought to appsec and what appsec teams can bring to 2024. Several of the headline-grabbing attacks were old-school flaws, but that’s also because there’s a lot of legacy code out there. Other attacks were bots doing things users do – just at a bigger scale. In other words, attacks based on scraping and scalping and credential stuffing had nothing to do with input validation. They were all about finding workflows that benefited the attackers, whether an account takeover or hoarding concert tickets.
The month’s third episode took us to the vault for an episode from August 2021 where Maggie Jauregi talked about firmware security. She shared tips on getting into hardware and firmware security on a small budget – something that can broaden the community of researchers in this area. She talked about that community and how welcoming it’s been. Hacking is a creative endeavor and it’s fun to interact with physical devices, whether it’s triggering a glitch with walkie talkies like in her first DEF CON presentation or playing with Raspberry PI and Arduinos.
We ended the month with a conversation on starting things – like starting an appsec program and starting an appsec career. Akira and John shared their questions and insights on how to decide when to specialize, when a startup might consider hiring for an appsec role, and how to figure out if you want that role to take on more engineering or more security testing responsibilities. While there was an unspoken theme of maturity models, there was quite a fun theme of music and being a virtuoso!
Subscribe to ASW to find these episodes and more! Also check out the October 2023 recap.
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October was the month when tales of terror were timely and horror marked our days to Halloween.
We started with a topic that instills fear into everyone at some point – public speaking. Lina Lau returned to give us examples of how she crafts and delivers presentations. We talk about what kinds of presentations keep our attention and the kinds that put us to sleep. Not only does Lina excel at delivering engaging presentations, she puts those skills to work in creating multi-day training courses for incident responders.
Lina first joined us back in February of this year to give an incident responder’s view of appsec. Check out episode 230.
Our second week brought another returning guest, Janet Worthington. She covered the conversations she’s had with developers and appsec teams about tools like SCA and SAST. More importantly, she highlighted that how those tools are used is really a side-effect of a good DevSecOps program. Trust and the “no look pass” is one part of a good program. Seeing DevSecOps teams focus their attention on design – securing what they sell – is a much better indicator of success than forever focusing on finding and fixing flaws.
It was just over a year ago that Janet joined us to talk about appsec education in universities. Check out episode 213.
Week three was OT. Huxley Barbee gave us some background on how insecure OT devices have been in the last few decades. But we also turned to what might help OT devices be more secure for the next few decades. It’s still hard to emulate and test many of these systems, which limits the amount of security researchers that take the time to understand and test them. It’s also still hard to find development toolchains that provide robust security feedback and testing. We’ve seen great improvements for C and C++ code with features like LLVM’s sanitizers. Hopefully we’ll see those and more applied to these OT devices as well.
Then Dan Moore returned to talk about the secure by design and secure by default aspects of OAuth and WebAuthn. I was curious about how OAuth added more capabilities and extensions to deal with new design patterns like single-page apps and the proliferation of mobile apps. The two standards aren’t directly comparable in terms of problems they solve, but they share many goals in making adoption easier by developers and countering certain threats to users. There’s also a lesson in what they don’t cover, like account recovery, and why that remains an area that attackers continue to successfully exploit.
Our show just before Halloween covered an appropriately scary topic – how security tools must evolve. Dan Kuykendall talked about the struggle of scanners to keep up with modern app designs and why being beholden to industry categories isn’t providing modern dev teams with the solutions they need. That took us into dev leadership and how to inspire security teams to build effective tools.
Subscribe to ASW to find these episodes and more! Also check out the September 2023 recap.
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September was the month we hit our 8-bit milestone on Application Security Weekly.
The first week we went to the vault for an episode from January 2022 where Christien Rioux talked about how appsec needs to move beyond its past – vulns, checklists, hardening guides – and into a future of sandboxed apps and decorated data.
Then we talked with Simon Bennetts about how and why he started ZAP. As a long-time fan of the project, I enjoyed learning more about its past (it’s been decades since I last heard mention of Paros Proxy!) and, more importantly, to hear about its future with The Software Security Project.
One of the takeaways that I didn’t emphasize enough was Simon’s outreach and interaction with developers – we need more appsec folks speaking at developer conferences.
Next up was Karl Triebes, who gave us a chance to go beyond the all-too-vague label of “business logic” attacks to understand why they’re hard to pin down – by appsec team and developers alike. For me, that’s where the real interesting security flaws are, where human creativity can look at the workflow intended by an app and then come up with ways to abuse it.
Last up was a return to supply chains with Kirsten Newcomer. The SBOMs have been around for a while – SPDX is over a decade old. Which makes it seem like there are so many things that we need to do that aren’t new. But that’s probably also because they’re not easy to do and, I think, because appsec gets too wrapped up in vulns and the cliche of fixing vulns early at the expense of spending time on more strategic work.
Subscribe to ASW to find these episodes and more! Also check out the August 2023 recap.
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