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. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_435_polyfill_io_open_source_is_too_big_to_fix.mp3 Show Notes 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. ...

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. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_433_Should_OpenSSH_block_misbehaving_clients.mp3 Show Notes 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. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_432_Flipper_Zero_with_Alex_Kulagin.mp3 Show Notes Flipper Zero Website Headphone jack radio capture Flipper Zero on Tik Tok

Updated 2025-01-16: Since writing this post, there’s now a vulnerability focused discord you can join to discuss vulnerabilities. You can join with this link If you follow the vulnerability world, 2024 is starting to feel like we’ve become trapped in the mirror universe. NVD collapsed, the Linux kernel is generating a huge number of CVE IDs, CISA is maybe enriching the CVE data, and the growth rate of CVE is higher than its ever been. It feels like we’re careening off a cliff in the clown car where half the people are trapped inside trying to get out, and the other half are laughing at the clown honking its nose. ...

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. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_431_Redirecting_HTTP_to_HTTPS.mp3 Show Notes 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? https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_430_Frozen_kernel_security.mp3 Show Notes 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. ...

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. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_428_GitHub_artifact_attestation.mp3 Show Notes 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. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_427_Will_run0_replace_sudo.mp3 Show Notes Conan O’Brien on Hot Ones Lennart’s Mastodon thread xkcd automation