Absolute AppSec

Podcast viewers will be familiar with Portswigger's annual list of Web Hacking Techniques. Ken and Seth take some time to digest the list and recommend reviewing not only the top 10, but also the nominations. A discussion on the use of LLM Agents as a dynamic scanning engine for identifying vulnerabilities. If you aren't already using an LLM to help speed up your AppSec, why not? Finally, a discussion on security statistics and how bad they are.

Ken and Seth comment on their recent use of the same passwords across multiple organizations. Errr, or wait. That's administrators in some instances, according to recently published analysis from Lares. Will we ever get over passwords or are we doomed to repeat the past? In other news, GitHub Copilot may be (one of) the culprit(s) for the enshitification of code, based on a published paper from GitClear. Or it might just be that organizations and developers should have coding standards. Or maybe it's not that deep. Come join us and chat about it.

Seth and Ken return to the podcast to talk about fraud scammers based on a recent article from Cory Doctorow and what AppSec can do to protect their apps and themselves. Crocs and Socks. The use of deep fakes to scam corporations to transfer money. Finally, a discussion on sensitive data and why it happens in APIs due to the recent news that Spoutible exposed all sorts of tokens as reported by Troy Hunt.

Ken and Seth start out with a lengthy discussion about application security jobs, training, and getting into the security space due to an article based on someone's experience moving from IT to pentesting. This is followed by possible needs for the NSA to collect commercially available browsing data. Finally, a quick hit on prompt injection and how things are moving quickly in the AI/LLM space.

Seth and Ken are back after a weeks hiatus and start by demonstrating FlowMate, a newly released Burp Extension for building context of the parameters used by an application. This is followed by in-depth analysis of Reversing Lab's State of Software Supply Chain Security Report.

Ken and Seth return to settle the age old question of whether false positives or false negatives are better when dealing with security tools. Tears are shed as stories of wasted efforts ring through on the podcasting airwaves. Maybe. Discussions on AI generated recommendations and how it _can_ be useful, but also turn out poorly. Finally, introductions on large scale vulnerability management at GitHub and how organizations struggle to fix issues identified through multiple streams.

Seth and Ken kick off a new year talking about recent news, including improvements in security process for software supply chains. This is followed by security predictions for 2024, including LLMs, dynamic scanning, process, and other possibilities in the near future.

David Trejo (@[email protected]) and Paul Kuliniewicz, security engineers at Chime join Seth (@sethlaw on x) and Ken (@cktricky) to discuss the ins and outs of challenges and successes in a widely recognized effective product security program. You can start reading up on the Monocle program here: https://medium.com/life-at-chime/monocle-how-chime-creates-a-proactive-security-engineering-culture-part-1-dedd3846127f And part 2 here: https://medium.com/life-at-chime/mitigating-risky-pull-requests-with-monocle-risk-advisor-part-2-7013e1485bf2.

Ken and Seth return to discuss current news. First up is a discussion about token leakage based on the recent discovery of AI tokens on Github and Cloud tokens on Hugging Face's repository. The struggles that package maintainers have with hosted data and secrets is an old problem that doesnt' have a good solution. A re-hash of the recent blogpost "Cybersecurity isn't Special" and how this also isn't a new idea.

Ken and Seth decide whether the idea of security reviews are dead, spurred on by a recent blog post by Frank Wang on doing away with the current perception of reviews. This is followed by a walkthrough of the Splunk XSLT code and vulnerability for the PoC of CVE-2023-46214.