I’m not a super expert in all this, but I know enough to be dangerous. If I make any mistakes, please let me know (there are many ways to contact me listed in the “Contact” menu). I will clearly mark any changes to the post due to errors, feel free to check back and see what I got wrong. Since the CVE people won’t tell us anything useful, let’s use Cunningham’s Law to our advantage. ...
If you are a security nerd, and even if you’re not, you probably heard about the epic CVE mess that happened. It’s a very long story and was covered in many places, but the TL;DR was the funding for CVE fell through, panic ensued, then CISA found some temporary funds to keep the lights, so everything is fine and we can all go back to normal. Well, some of us won’t go back to normal because the CISA funding is good for 11 months. Will there be more funding in 11 months? Will an asteroid destroy the Earth in 2032? Will society still exists at Christmas? Nobody really knows. Well that asteroid one, we sort of know that. We’ll be fine. Yay science! ...
Josh and Kurt talk about three government activities happening around security. CISA has a request for comment, and an international strategic plan around cybersecurity. These are both good ideas, and hopefully will help drive change. But we also discuss an EU proposal that brings liability rules to software which sounds like a great way to force change to happen. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_453_Software_Liability.mp3 Show Notes Request for Comment on Product Security Bad Practices Guidance FY2025-2026 CISA International Strategic Plan EU brings product liability rules in line with digital age and circular economy CSA Cloud Controls Matrix
Josh and Kurt talk about a few things that have recently come out of CISA. They seem to be blaming the vendors for a lot of the problems, but there’s also not any actionable advice telling the vendors what they should be doing. This feels like the classic case of “just security harder”. We need CISA to be leading the way funding and defining security, not blaming vendors for giving the market what it demands. ...
Josh and Kurt talk about two documents from the US government that discuss open source in very different ways. The CISA document lays out a way to measure open source, but we take issue with the idea of trying to measure which open source projects are “good”. The Whitehouse on the other hand takes an approach that is very open source, get involved. Trying to measure open source isn’t producing anything actionable, but getting involved is very actionable, and very much how open source works. ...
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 the new SSDF attestation form from CISA. The current form isn’t very complicated, and the SSDF has a lot of room for interpretation. But this is the start of something big. It’s going to take a long time to see big changes in supply chain security, but we’re confident they will come. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_421_CISA_new_SSDF_attestation_form.mp3 Show Notes Secure Software Development Attestation Form The U.S. Military Is Missing Six Nuclear Weapons NIST 800-218
Josh and Kurt talk about insider threats, but not quite in the way one would expect. The potential for insider threats is possibly higher than usual right now, but what about open source? Are open source developers insider threats for your organization? Have you ever thought about this before? https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_385_Is_open_source_an_insider_threat.mp3 Show Notes CISA insider threats hacks4pancakes toot Don’t Trust a Programmer Who Knows C++ CISA Insider Threat Mitigation
Josh and Kurt talk about SBOMs. Quite a bit has happened in the world of SBOMs in the last year or so. There are going to be different types of SBOMs, like build, source, or runtime. Each will tell us different things depending on what we need to know. We also cover some of the community efforts happening around SBOMs. They’re still not easy to use, but it’s better better. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_364_Using_SBOMs_is_hard.mp3 Show Notes SBOM Types draft SBOM Drift OpenSSF SBOM Everywhere
Josh and Kurt talk about the Google Project Zero blog post about 0day vulnerabilities in 2021. There were a lot more than ever before, but why? Part of the challenge is the whole industry is expanding while a lot of our security technologies are not. When the universe around you is expanding but you’re staying the same size, you are actually shrinking. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_321_Relativistic_Security_Project_Zero_on_0day.mp3 Show Notes Google Project Zero blog post Apple 0days Joint cyber advisory