Josh and Kurt talk to Jay Jacobs about Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS). EPSS is a new way to view vulnerabilities. It’s a metric for the likelyhood that a vulnerability will be exploited in the next 30 days. Jay explains how EPSS got to where it is today, how the scoring works, and how we can start to think about including it in our larger risk equations. It’s a really fun discussion. ...
Josh and Kurt talk about three wangles of responsibility. We start with a story about a bike theft ring, bike theft doesn’t usually get any attention, but this one is special. Then we ask why it seems like everyone is getting hacked, it’s because they have to tell us now. And finally we have a story about the huge number of unreported vulnerabilities in open source projects. This statistic probably affects all software, but there’s some numbers for open source specifically. ...
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 Daniel Stenberg about curl. Daniel is the creator of curl, we chat with him about the security of curl. Daniel tells us how curl is kept secure, we learn about some of the historical reasons curl works the way it does. We hear the story about the curl CVE situation firsthand. We also touch on the importance of curating the community of a popular open source project. ...
Josh and Kurt talk about a curl and glibc bug. The bugs themselves aren’t super interesting, but there are other conversations around the bugs that are interesting. Why don’t we just rewrite everything in Rust? Why can’t we just train developers to stop writing insecure code. How can AI solve this problem? It’s a marvelous conversation that ends on the very basic idea: we already have the security the market demands. Unless we change that demand, security won’t change. ...
Josh and Kurt ask the question what is a vulnerability, but in the framing of video games. Security loves to categorize all bugs as security vulnerabilities or not security vulnerabilities. But the reality nothing is so simple. Everything is a question of risk, not vulnerability. The discussion about video games can help us to better have this discussion. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_388_Video_game_vulnerabilities.mp3 Show Notes Colossus bug Minecraft Heist
Josh and Kurt talk about OpenAI having a bug in ChatGPT, then they tried to blame open source. It didn’t go very well. In this episode Josh and Kurt argue a lot, maybe someday we’ll know who was the least wrong. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_369_OpenAI_broke_ChatGPT_then_tried_to_blame_open_source.mp3 Show Notes ChatGPT Tweet ChatGPT Blog redis bug
Josh and Kurt talk about the number of dependencies that is now normal. Keeping track of thousands of dependencies used to be impressive, now it’s normal. In what instances should we know everything about our open source? The days of being able to ignore your software liability is looking like it’s coming to an end. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_366_Software_liability_is_coming.mp3 Show Notes LTT millenial pause The perverse incentive of vulnerability counting National Cybersecurity Strategy