Josh talks to David Bernstein about the world of crisis management and business continuity. David is a certified emergency manager and tell us about preparing for both digital and physical disruptions. Everything is IT now, so the way we think about disaster preparedness is changing. We talk about understanding risks, creating plans, and the role of practice in the world of crisis management. This is a super interesting universe and Dave was very patient and kind. I learned a lot and can’t wait for Dave to come back. ...

I posted a graph on LinkedIn. It showed that of the 10 million open source projects tracked by ecosyste.ms, more than half haven’t been updated in two years. I didn’t suggest old was bad or good, but I got a number of replies about most of this software is “done” so it’s fine. We don’t have any evidence either way, I’m unwilling to make any claims about the numbers (yet, I’m working on it). This got me wondering what it would mean for software to be “done”. Which then led to the question is anything ever done? It’s a lot harder to figure this out than I had expected. ...

William Brown is back! This time Josh chats with him about Passkeys. WTF are they? A Passkey is a form of multi factor authentication, but it’s not super obvious what that really means. William does a fantastic job explaining what a Passkey is, how we got to where we are today with Passkeys. He shares a ton of explanations about the whole world of authentication along the way. Some of this stuff is basically magic. ...

Josh discusses Suricata with Victor Julien, the founder and lead developer of the Suricata project. Victor explains the history of Suricata, its impact on cybersecurity, and the community that keeps it all running. Challenges like encrypted traffic and the evolution of open-source projects. Victor even gives us a glimpse into what he sees as the future of the project. There’s a lot to learn about Suricata in this one. Episode Links Victor Suricata Kelley episode Suricata github This episode is also available as a podcast, search for “Open Source Security” on your favorite podcast player. ...

If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember the essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The TL;DR was that old open source was the cathedral of exclusive developers and groups. Then the Bazaar showed up (which was the Linux Kernel for example) and that freed us from the shackles of the cathedral. Except if we look at how things evolved, it wasn’t actually a bazaar. It was a bunch of roadside churches that are now megachurches. But there is still a bazaar, and it’s holding up our modern infrastructure. ...

Josh talks to Gergely Nagy (algernon) about his tool Iocaine. Iocaine creates a maze to trap scraping bots in a world a fake pages they cannot escape. algernon tells us how Iocaine effectively traps bots by serving them endless loops of nonsensical URLs and web pages. It’s an extremely clever tool that’s designed to be completely hidden from normal users, but not hidden to the scrapers. Episode Links Gergely Iocaine algernon on Mastodon Nam-Shub of Enki Iocaine on mastodon Iocaine example site This episode is also available as a podcast, search for “Open Source Security” on your favorite podcast player. ...

Josh chats with Xe Iaso, the creator of Anubis the web AI firewall. We discuss how Anubis is tackling bots and scrapers. The discussion around the scrapers is fascinating and challenging, these things are everywhere and don’t behave very nicely. There’s also discussion about running a successful open source project. Xe has a lot of experience to share with us, you’re going to learn something new with this one. Episode Links Xe Anubis Blog Odd number of cores blog Common Crawl This episode is also available as a podcast, search for “Open Source Security” on your favorite podcast player. ...

Josh talk to Dirkjan and Joe about Rustls (pronounced rustles), a Rust-based TLS library. Dirkjan and Joe are developers on Rustls. We talk about the history that got us to this point. The many many challenges in writing a TLS library (Rust or not). We also chat about some of what’s to come. Rustls has an OpenSSL compatibility layer which makes is a really interesting project. Episode Links Dirkjan Joe Rustls This episode is also available as a podcast, search for “Open Source Security” on your favorite podcast player. ...

Josh welcomes back Daniel Thompson explore the rather silly question of whether Santa Claus needs to be compliant with the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). This episode was intended to be silly, but it ended up being an incredibly interesting conversation. Daniel explained a great deal about how the CRA works and how it could apply to Santa Claus. The TL;DR is even if he’s giving out free stuff, the CRA almost certainly applies. Daniel also fills us in on his book (you can email Josh to enter into a drawing for a copy), and his work on web browsers for the CRA. It’s an incredibly informative discussion. ...