Open Source Security

Josh and Kurt talk about open source and autonomy. This is even related to some recent return to office news. The conversation weaves between a few threads, but fundamentally there's some questions about why do people do what they do, especially in the world of open source. This also is a problem we see in security, security people love to tell developers what to do. Developers don't like being told what to do.

• pycurl issue
• Apple, SpaceX, Microsoft return-to-office mandates drove senior talent away
• RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us
• Sudo-rs dependencies: when less is better
• phishing webcomic
• Debian OpenSSL Bug (16 years)

Josh and Kurt talk about a new to sign artifacts on GitHub. It's in beta, it's not going to be easy to use, it will have bugs. But that's all OK. This is how we start. We need infrastructure like this to enable easier to use features in the future. Someday, everything will be signed by default.

• GitHub artifact attestation

Josh and Kurt talk about a sudo replacement going into systemd called run0. It sounds like it'll get a lot right, but systemd is a pretty big attack surface and not everyone is a fan. We shall have to see if this ends up replacing sudo.

• Conan O'Brien on Hot Ones
• Lennart's Mastodon thread
• xkcd automation

Josh and Kurt talk about a paper describing using a LLM to automatically create exploits for CVEs. The idea is probably already happening in many spaces such as pen testing and intelligence services. We can't keep up with the number of vulnerabilities we have, there's no way we can possibly keep up with a glut of LLM generated vulnerabilities. We really need to rethink how we handle vulnerabilities.

• OpenAI's GPT-4 can exploit real vulnerabilities by reading security advisories
• paper: LLM Agents can Autonomously Exploit One-day Vulnerabilities
• Cisco Fixes RV320/RV325 Vulnerability by Banning "curl" in User-Agent
• Episode 219 – Chat with Larry Cashdollar
• Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI?

Josh and Kurt talk about a database of game cheaters. Cheating in games has many similarities to security problems. Anti cheat rootkits are also terrible. The clever thing however is using statistics to identify cheaters. Statistics don't lie. Also, we discuss the Pretendo project sitting on a vulnerability for a year, is this ethical?

• Hacker News searchable database

• Benford's law

• John Oliver Medicaid

• Mario64 invisible walls

• Pretendo

• Pretendo exploit

Josh and Kurt talk about a Notepad++ fake website. It's possibly not illegal, but it's certainly ethically wrong. We also end up discussing why it seems like all these weird and wild things keep happening. It's probably due to the massive size of open source (and everything) now. Things have gotten gigantic and we didn't really notice.

• Help us to take down the parasite website
• Open Source is bigger than you can imagine
• Toronto Pearson International Airport heist

Josh and Kurt talk about a new FCC program to provide a cybersecurity certification mark. Similar to other consumer safety marks such as UL or CE. We also tie this conversation into GrapheneOS, and what trying to claim a consumer device is secure really means. Some of our compute devices have an infinite number of possible states. It's a really weird and hard problem.

• GrapheneOS
• FCC approves cybersecurity label for consumer devices
• Cyber Trust Mark Logo

Josh and Kurt talk about the recent events around XZ. It's only been a few days, and it's amazing what we already know. We explain a lot of the basics we currently know with the attitude much of these details will change quickly over the coming week. We can't fix this problem as it stands, we don't know where to start yet. But that's not a reason to lose hope. We can fix this if we want to, but it won't be flashy, it'll be hard work.

• GossiTheDog's Blog Post
• fr0gger diagram
• OpenSSF Blog (archive)
• stb library

Josh and Kurt talk about the security.txt file. It's not new, but it's not something we've discussed before. It's a great idea, an easy format, and well defined. It's not high on many of our todo lists, but it's something worth doing.

• RFC 9116

Josh and Kurt talk about the new SSDF attestation form from CISA. The current form isn't very complicated, and the SSDF has a lot of room for interpretation. But this is the start of something big. It's going to take a long time to see big changes in supply chain security, but we're confident they will come.

• Secure Software Development Attestation Form
• The U.S. Military Is Missing Six Nuclear Weapons
• NIST 800-218