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. ...
Josh and Kurt talk about how to think about open source in the context of society. Open source is more like a natural resource than a supplier. It’s common to think of open source projects as delivered to us, but it’s more like acquiring raw materials from the forest. The problem is we’re harvesting the raw materials in an unsustainable manner at the moment. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_357_Is_open_source_being_overexploited.mp3 Show Notes I am not a supplier Josh’s question about the environment sjvn Gorilla toolkit article Gorilla Web Toolkit Awesome Games Done Quick GeoGuessr Awesome Games Done Quick 2023
It seems like every few years the topic of counting vulnerabilities in products shows up. Last time the focus seemed to be around vulnerabilities in Linux distributions, which made distroless and very small container images popular. Today it seems to be around the vulnerabilities in open source dependencies. The general idea is you want to have as few vulnerabilities in the open source you’re using, so logically zero is the goal. ...
Josh and Kurt talk about a blog post that explains there isn’t really an open source software supply chain. The whole idea of open source being one thing is incorrect, open source is really a lot of little things put together. A lot of companies and organizations get this wrong. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_343_Stop_trying_to_fix_the_open_source_software_supply_chain.mp3 Show Notes Iliana’s Twitter There is no “software supply chain” Google supply chain blog GitHub ansi_term advisory PyPI 2FA Dashboard tarfile issue rediscovered in 2022
Josh and Kurt talk about the Time Till Open Source Alternative blog post. The numbers probably don’t mean what we think they mean anymore. A lot of modern open source is really corporate controlled. Just because something carries an open source license doesn’t mean you can contribute to it. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_341_Time_till_open_source_alternative.mp3 Show Notes Time Till Open Source Alternative GitHub Desktop issue 78 The Reddit Safe