Open Source Security

Josh and Kurt talk about some of the necessary evils of security. There are challenges we face like passwords and resource management. Sometimes the problem is old ideas, sometimes it's we don't have metrics. Can you measure not getting hacked?

Show Notes

• Clearing checks
• FAIR Institute
• Factorio

Josh and Kurt start this one by explaining how the Twitter hacker was just a dumb criminal (most criminals are dumb). We then discuss the new GPT-3 AI that can create text. How we create, and how social media is doing everything it can to weaponize our attention. It's not a fight humanity is winning.

Show Notes

• GPT-3 AI
• Blipverts

Josh and Kurt talk about Google's new confidential VMs. The AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization is the technology that makes it all possible. What is SEV, how does it work, and why should you care? This technology is going to be the future of the cloud.

Show Notes

• Google confidential VMs
• AMD SEV
• SEV vs SGX

Josh and Kurt talk to Alyssa Miller from Snyk about the State of Open Source Security 2020 report. Alyssa was the report author and has some great insight into the current trends we're seeing in open source security. Some of the challenges developers face. We discuss the difficulty static and composition analysis scanners face. It's a great conversation!

Show Notes

• The State of Open Source Security 2020
• Alyssa's Twitter

Josh and Kurt talk about some recent security actions Apple has taken. Not all are good, but in general Apple is doing things to benefit their customers (their customers are not advertisers). We also discuss some of the challenges when your customers are advertisers.

Show Notes

• Apple one year certificates
• Apple declines to implement 16 new APIs
• Apple is tracking unsigned executables

Josh and Kurt talk about human behavior. The conversation makes its way to conferences and the perpetual question of if a conference is useful or not. We come to the agreement the big shows aren't what they used to be, but things like BSides are great experiences.

Show Notes

• Security and Human Behaviour
• Josh's blog post
• Mudge's Twitter thread

Josh and Kurt talk about the security of applications. We talk about the security of infrastructure all the time, but what happens when we combine infrastructure into an application or solution?

• Picture of Kurt's security check-up
• Dragon controls

Josh and Kurt talk about CVSSv3 and how it's broken. We started with a blog post to explain why the NVD CVSS scores are so wrong, and we ended up researching CVSSv3 and found out it's far more broken than any of us expected in ways we didn't expect. NVD isn't broken, CVSSv3 is. How did we get here? Are there any options that work today? Where should we go next?

• Josh's blog post
• NVD
• Red Hat security data
• Josh's CVE data project
• Microsoft security ratings scale

Josh and Kurt talk to Liz Rice from Aqua Security about container security and her new book on the same topic. What does container security look like today? What are some things you can do now? What will container security look like in the future?

• Container Security download
• Pictures of elephants
• Kubernetes Security book
• Starboard project
• Dynamic threat analysis

Josh and Kurt talk about a grab bag of topics. A DNS security flaw, port scanning your machine from a web browser, and CSV files running arbitrary code. All of these things end up being the result of corner cases. Letting a corner case be part of a default setup is always a mistake. Yes always, not even that one time.

Show Notes

• Bind advisory
• Robustness Principal
• eBay port scanning localhost
• OWASP CSV injection