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! ...
VulnCon 2025 is over. I didn’t go. A bunch of people have asked me why, and rather than keep my answer to a small group, I thought it would make sense to write something public about it all. The TL;DR is I went to a different conference that I thought was a better use of my time. The conference I went to was Cyphercon and BSides Milwaukee. They are regional conferences in Wisconsin. Good people, great shows, a lot of fun and learning. Yeah, it was technically the week before VulnCon, but I lack the fortitude to do two conferences back to back. Some people can, I tip my hat to those folks. I’m not one of them. I should be clear though, this isn’t the only reason. I also don’t think VulnCon should exist (more on that at the end). ...
Very recently the Node.js project filed a few CVE IDs for end of life products. For vulnerability nerds this is exciting because historically EOL things didn’t get CVE IDs just for being EOL. And as one would expect, there are plenty of folks who think this is the best idea ever, and a bunch worried this will be the event that destroys modern civilized society. Today there’s not really a good place to track what is or isn’t end of life software. There are some datasets being worked on but they’re very new, and it’s “yet another dataset” we will all have to figure out. CVE could be a place to track details like this, but it’s not a simple conversation. ...
Josh and Kurt talk about a CWE Top 25 list from MITRE. The list itself is fine, but we discuss why the list looks the way it does (it’s because of WordPress). We also discuss why Josh hates lists like this (because they never create any actions). We finish up running through the whole list with a few comments about the findings. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_459_CWE_Top_25_List.mp3 Show Notes 2024 CWE Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses Set of 9 Unusual Odd Sided dice - D3, D5, D7, D9, D11, D13, D15, D17 & D19
Josh and Kurt talk about the recent CUPS issue. The vulnerability itself wasn’t all that exciting, but the whole disclosure process was wild. There’s a lot to talk about, many things didn’t quite go as planned and it all leaked early. Let’s talk about why and what it all means. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_449_The_CUPSpocalypse.mp3 Show Notes CUPS vulnerability Akamai report Wil Wheaton: being a nerd is not about what you love; it’s about how you love it
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 paper describing using a LLM to automatically create exploits for CVEs. The idea is probably already happening in many spaces such as pen testing and intelligence services. We can’t keep up with the number of vulnerabilities we have, there’s no way we can possibly keep up with a glut of LLM generated vulnerabilities. We really need to rethink how we handle vulnerabilities. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_426_Automatically_exploiting_CVEs_with_AI.mp3 Show Notes OpenAI’s GPT-4 can exploit real vulnerabilities by reading security advisories paper: LLM Agents can Autonomously Exploit One-day Vulnerabilities Cisco Fixes RV320/RV325 Vulnerability by Banning “curl” in User-Agent Episode 219 – Chat with Larry Cashdollar Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI?
Josh and Kurt talk about what’s going on at the National Vulnerability Database. NVD suddenly stopped enriching vulnerabilities, and it’s sent shock-waves through the vulnerability management space. While there are many unknowns right now, the one thing we can count on is things won’t go back to the way they were. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_420_Whats_going_on_at_NVD.mp3 Show Notes Anchore’s Blog Grype Josh’s Cyphercon Talk Ecosyste.ms Episode 266 – The future of security scanning with Debricked
Josh and Kurt talk to GregKH about Linux Kernel security. We most focus on the topic of vulnerabilities in the Linux Kernel, and what being a CNA will mean for the future of Linux Kernel security vulnerabilities. The future of Linux Kernel security vulnerabilities is going to be very interesting. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_417_Linux_Kernel_security_with_Greg_K-H.mp3 Show Notes Greg K-H Linux Kernel is a CNA Machine learning and stable kernels Bug reporting for Linux