Josh and Kurt talk about a grab bag of old technologies that defined the security industry. Technology like SELinux, SSH, Snort, ModSecurity and more all started with humble beginnings, and many of them created new security industries. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_411_The_security_tools_that_started_it_all.mp3 Show Notes SELinux AppArmor SSH ModSecurity Snort Nmap Nessus What comes after open source
Josh and Kurt talk about Sonatype’s 9th Annual State of the Software Supply Chain. There’s a ton of data in the report, but the thing we want to talk about is the statistic that only 11% of open source is actually being maintained. Do we think that’s true? Does it really matter? https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_398_Is_only_11_of_open_source_mainted.mp3 Show Notes Sonatype report ecosyste.ms GNOME libcue flaw Reality 2.0 supply chain episode
Josh and Kurt talk about contributor license agreements (CLAs). CLAs used to be seen as a necessary evil, but they’re almost certainly bad now. We’re seeing CLAs being abused, it’s clear now anything controlled by a CLA won’t be open source forever. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_396_CLAs_are_bad_Mkay.mp3 Show Notes A Theory of Joint Authorship for Free and Open Source Software Projects Bruce Perens: What Comes After Open Source
Josh and Kurt talk about filing bugs for software. There’s the old saying that anyone can file bugs and submit patches for open source, but the reality is most people can’t. Filing bugs for both closed and open source is nearly impossible in many instances. Even if you want to file a bug for an open source project, there are a lot of hoops before it’s something that can be actionable. ...
Josh and Kurt talk about the difference between what we think of as traditional open source, and enterprise software projects that have an open source license. They are both technically open source, but how the projects work is very very different. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_387_Enterprise_open_source_is_different.mp3 Show Notes CentOS Stream PR The Most Prolific Packager For Alpine Linux Is Stepping Away
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
There’s been something in the back of my brain that’s been bothering me about talks at the big conferences lately but I just couldn’t figure out how to talk about it. Until I listed to this episode of The Hacker Mind Podcast on Self Healing Operating Systems (it’s a great podcast, like and subscribe). The episode was all about this incredibly bizarre way to store operating system state in a SQL database (yeah, you read that right). The guest made no excuses that this is a pretty wild idea and it’s not going to happen anytime soon. But we need weird research like this, it’s part of the forward march of progress. ...
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 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 Fiona Krakenbürger about the Sovereign Tech Fund. This is a fund created by Germany to fund important open source projects. Fiona has amazing insight into how this fund was created, what it’s doing today to help fund open source. She discusses where we go from here and what the future will look like. The Sovereign Tech Fund is a forward thinking program to fund open source across the world. This episode is a window into the future. ...