I recently sat down with Brian Fox, CTO and co-founder of Sonatype, about a report they recently published about malware in open source ecosystems. This is something that’s not a surprise to anyone paying attention, but there are some things Sonatype is doing in this space that’s very clever. I’ve known Brian for a long time so it was a treat to catch up and see what they found, and what it means for the future. ...
Josh and Kurt talk about an attack against PyTorch and NPM. The PyTorch attack shows the difficulty of operating a large open source project. The NPM situation continues to show the difficulty in trying to backdoor open source. Many people are watching, and it only takes one person to notice a problem and report it, and we all benefit. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_413_PyTorch_and_NPM_get_attacked_but_its_OK.mp3 Show Notes Peanut Butter the dog plays Gyromite The Wizard movie PyTorch supply chain attack npm Package Found Delivering Sophisticated RAT Deceptive Deprecation: The Truth About npm Deprecated Packages Changing a lightbulb Spelunking the Bitcoin Blockchain with Josh Bressers | CypherCon 4.0 Operation Triangulation - What You Get When Attack iPhones of Researchers 9th Annual State of the Software Supply Chain
Josh and Kurt talk about namespaces. They were a topic in the last podcast, and resulted in a much much larger discussion for us. We decided to hash out some of our thinking in an episode. This is a much harder problem than either of us expected. We don’t have any great answers, but we do have a lot of questions. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_378_Naming_things_is_harder_than_security.mp3 Show Notes Not Red Hat NPM hash package Episode 129 – The EU bug bounty program
Josh and Kurt finish up the leftpad discussion. We spent a lot of time talking about how the market will respond to these sort of events, and the market did indeed speak; very little has changed. There is an aspect of all these security events where we need to understand the cost vs benefit just isn’t there. it may never be there. Rather than whine and complain, we need to work with our constraints. ...
Josh and Kurt revisit Episode 77, which was named “npm and the supply chain” but was a discussion about the incident we all know now as “leftpad”. We didn’t understand what was happening at the time, but this would become an event we talk about for years to come. It’s shocking how many of the things we discuss are still completely valid five years later. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_374_The_event_we_called_left-pad_Episode_77_remaster_part_1.mp3 Show Notes Episode 77 – npm and the supply chain
Josh and Kurt talk about some data on the size of NPM. Josh wrote a blog post and a report about the amount of SEO spam in NPM was released. Open source is enormous, and it’s mostly one person. It’s hard to imagine how this all works sometimes and this lack of understanding can create challenges. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_370_Open_Source_is_bigger_than_you_can_imagine.mp3 Show Notes Josh’s blog on the size of NPM One In Two New Npm Packages Is SEO Spam Right Now Linux Kernel power distribution graph
Josh and Kurt talk to Jill Moné-Corallo about GitHub’s bug bounty and product security team. It’s a treat to discuss bug bounties with someone who is managing a very large bug bounty for one of the most important web sites in the world of software today. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_353_Jill_Mone-Corallo_on_GitHubs_bug_bounty_program.mp3 Show Notes Jill’s Twitter Jill’s Mastodon GitHub Bug Bounty Bug bounty scope Eight years of the GitHub Security Bug Bounty program GitHub NPM bug bounty find
Josh and Kurt talk about programming language ecosystems tracking and publishing security advisory details. We are at a point in the language ecosystems where they are giving us services that have historically been reserved for operating systems. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_342_Programming_languages_are_the_new_operating_system.mp3 Show Notes Kelsey Hightower tweet OSS-Fuzz
Josh and Kurt talk about PyPI mandating two factor authentication for the top 1% of projects. It feels like a simple idea, but it’s not when you start to think about it. What problems does 2FA solve? How common are these attacks? What are the second and third order effects of mandating 2FA? This episode should have something for everyone on all sides of this discussion to violently disagree with. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_332_PyPI_2FA_or_not_2FA_that_is_the_question.mp3 Show Notes PyPI announcement NPM expired domains Morten Linderud Tweet Congratulations: We Now Have Opinions on Your Open Source Contributions
Josh and Kurt talk about the binary nature of security. Many of our ideas are yes or no, there’s not much in the middle. The conversation ends up derailed due to a Twitter thread about pinning dependencies. This gives you an idea how contentious of a topic pinning is. The final takeaway is not to let security turn into your identity, it ends up making a mess. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_317_The_lack_of_compromise_in_security.mp3 Show Notes Josh’s Twitter thread How to install week old npm packages