Josh and Kurt talk about a pretty big bug found in CocoPods ownership. We also touch on a paper that discusses the technical debt that open source should have. We discuss what the long term sustainability of open source. There aren't any good solutions for open source today, but talking about these problems is important, we have to start to understand what's going on before we can plausibly discuss solutions. If you're an open source project that needs to put things on pause, or even walk way, that's OK.

• CocoaPods Vulnerabilities Could Hit Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, TikTok, Snap and More
• The Expense of Unprotected Free Software
• Long-term maintenance of PCRE2 #426

Josh and Kurt talk about the recent OpenSSH vulnerability and the node-ip project owner taking their project private. They're quasi related in the context of two open source projects handled bugs very differently. The OpenSSH bug isn't really as serious as it seems, but you still want to patch.

The node-ip bug is a very different story. The relationship between users and open source developers is one experiencing more strain now than we've ever seen. It's a weird conversation and we don't have good answers. Security in general is a collection of unsolvable problems.

• Qualys security advisory
• Hacker News Discussion
• Security Cryptography Whatever
• Dev rejects CVE severity, makes his GitHub repo read-only

Josh and Kurt talk about the latest polyfill.io mess. Apparently someone took over a very popular project and started to serve malware. First XZ, now this. What does it mean for open source? We don't have any answers, and it's hard to even talk about this problem because it's so big. The thing is though, even if we can't fix open source, it's here to stay.

• Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites
• OpenSSF Scorecard

Josh and Kurt talk about three wangles of responsibility. We start with a story about a bike theft ring, bike theft doesn't usually get any attention, but this one is special. Then we ask why it seems like everyone is getting hacked, it's because they have to tell us now. And finally we have a story about the huge number of unreported vulnerabilities in open source projects. This statistic probably affects all software, but there's some numbers for open source specifically.

• The West Coast's Fanciest Stolen Bikes Are Getting Trafficked by One Mastermind in Jalisco, Mexico
• $5 million worth of stolen tools recovered thanks to Apple's AirTag — 12 secret storage facilities had around 15,000 construction tools
• Vulnerability fixes in plain sight: How your scanners are missing hundreds of vulnerabilities

Josh and Kurt talk about a new proposal from OpenSSH to add a timeout to penalize clients misbehaving. But this then brings up the typical security conversation of "if it's not perfect we shouldn't do it". Trying new things is a good thing, even if something fails, we learn a lesson that we can use in the future.

• OpenSSH introduces options to penalize undesirable behavior
• Hacker News comments

Josh and Kurt talk to Alex Kulagin from Flipper about the Flipper Zero. It's one of the coolest hacker devices that exists on the market. We talk about what it is, how it started, what it can (and can't) do. It's a really fun conversation.

• Flipper Zero Website
• Headphone jack radio capture
• Flipper Zero on Tik Tok

Josh and Kurt talk about a blog post titled "Your API Shouldn't Redirect HTTP to HTTPS". It's an interesting idea, and probably a good one. There is however a lot of baggage in this space as you'll hear in the discussion. There's no a simple solution, but this is certainly something to discuss.

• Your API Shouldn't Redirect HTTP to HTTPS
• Hacker News discussion
• HSTS Section 5.1

Josh and Kurt talk about a blog post about frozen kernels being more secure. We cover some of the history and how a frozen kernel works and discuss why they would be less secure. A frozen kernel is from when things worked very differently. What sort of changes will we see in the future?

• Kurt's strange coffee
• Why a 'frozen' distribution Linux kernel isn't the safest choice for 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