Open Source Security

Open Source Security welcomes Josh Corman to talk about the challenges around securing our critical infrastructure. Specifically the discussion centers around our water supplies. There are a lot of really wild things happening right now with attacks like Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon. Josh has an amazing ability to make these sort of discussions easy to understand without spreading FUD. Josh also has suggestions for actions that need to be taken to help deal with these problems. It's not all technical solutions, there are non technical things we can do to help reduce the risk posed by our technical systems failing.

The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-07-critical-infrastructure-josh-corman

Josh welcomes Josh Marpet for a discussion about abandoned open source packages. Josh Marpet has a foundation called Value Chain Risk Institute that has a report discussion how to start measuring if an open source package might be abandoned. There's a lot of data, but not a lot of groups using that data to help make informed decisions about using open source. VCRI is one of those places that's starting to do this.

The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-07-VCRI-josh-marpet

Josh welcomes Mo Duffy from Red Hat to chat about project Lightwell. The idea is to leverage the resources and understanding Red Hat has built up over the years to help deal with the deluge of vulnerability reports that are overwhelming open source projects. Mo does a really good job of explaining why this is fundamentally a people problem, not a technology problem. But it's a people problem we can probably use technology to help. It will be interesting to see where Lightwell goes in the next few years.

The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-07-lightwell-mo-duffy

Josh chats with Lori Lorusso and Niko Matsakis about the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund. This is a new project the Rust Foundation has create to help fund Rust maintainers. It's a great discussion where Lori and Niko cover all the ways they expect to fund the maintainers which is never as easy as one initially expects. Funding open source is a huge topic right now, it sounds like the Rust Foundation has some great ideas.

The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-07-rfmf-lori-niko

Josh chats with Allan Friedman about all things Bill of Materials. Allan did a ton of work to help turn SBOM into what it is today. He has many thoughts and ideas around the new types of BOMs, a concept he's calling the OmniBOM. Allan is always fun to chat with and he brings a ton of knowledge and advice.

The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-06-allan-omnibom

Josh welcomes Jordi Boggiano the lead maintainer of Composer and Packagist to explain the truckload of security features they've recently added. Packagist is the PHP package registry, Composer is the dependency manager for PHP. Recently the people behind these projects have added a number of security features that will improve the security of the entire ecosystem. Jordi explains it all to us and gives a glimpse of what's coming next.

The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-06-packagist-security-jordi

Josh welcomes Mike Milinkovich and Thabang Mashologu from the Eclipse Foundation to talk about their new managed Open VSX registry. This is the first open source package registry to create a commercial operation for large company users to help fund the registry. We discuss how we got here, what's actually going on, and why this commercial approach is working. Everyone knew this day would come, and it looks like the Eclipse Foundation got this one right.

The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-06-openvsx-mike-thabang/

Josh welcomes back François Proulx to talk about the absolute madness in the CI/CD universe right now. We also learn about François' new project SmokedMeat which is a tool to help you hack your own CI/CD. When Josh spoke to François a year ago, the world was a very different place than it is today. François has a ton of knowledge about how we got here and what we can do moving forward. Boost Security has a bunch of amazing open source tools François built that can help keep CI/CD systems understood and locked down.

The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-06-françois-smoked-meat/

Josh chats with Sal Kimmich about the current state of everything, and what we can expect next. Sal has some incredible insight into what we can expect to see due to the current wave of security bugs and incidents. There are some new features we will need in both our hardware and software to ward off the state of things. Since those features are years away, what we need in the short term is shoring up our SDLC programs. Sal has some really good medical examples and analogies for this one. It's a huge problem but not insurmountable.

The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-06-verification-sal-kimmich/

Josh talks to Casey Ellis about why vulnerability disclosure is so hard, and also so important. Casey is one of the best in this space having been a Bugcrowd founder. There are few people with more experience and insight into how a security vulnerability should be handled, and why the explosion of AI is making all this much harder than it's ever been before. While finding vulnerabilities is easy, reporting them is still a lot of work. Casey is working on helping everyone better understand all this with his disclose.io project.

The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-05-vulnerability-disclosure-casey-ellis/