Appsec still deals with ancient vulns like SQL injection and XSS. And now LLMs are generating code along side humans. Sandy Carielli and Janet Worthington join us once again to discuss what all this new code means for appsec practices. On a positive note, the prevalence of those ancient vulns seems to be diminishing, but the rising use of LLMs is expanding a new (but not very different) attack surface. We look at where orgs are investing in appsec, who appsec teams are collaborating with, and wh...
Jul 08, 2025•1 hr 7 min
Manual secure code reviews can be tedious and time intensive if you're just going through checklists. There's plenty of room for linters and compilers and all the grep-like tools to find flaws. Louis Nyffenegger describes the steps of a successful code review process. It's a process that starts with understanding code, which can even benefit from an LLM assistant, and then applies that understanding to a search for developer patterns that lead to common mistakes like mishandling data, not enforc...
Jul 01, 2025•38 min
Fuzzing has been one of the most successful ways to improve software quality. And it demonstrates how improving software quality improves security. Artur Cygan shares his experience in building and applying fuzzers to barcode scanners, smart contracts, and just about any code you can imagine. We go through the useful relationship between unit tests and fuzzing coverage, nudging fuzzers into deeper code paths, and how LLMs can help guide a fuzzer into using better inputs for its testing. Resource...
Jun 24, 2025•1 hr 1 min
What makes a threat modeling process effective? Do you need a long list of threat actors? Do you need a long list of terms? What about a short list like STRIDE? Has an effective process ever come out of a list? Farshad Abasi joins our discussion as we explain why the answer to most of those questions is No and describe the kinds of approaches that are more conducive to useful threat models. Resources: https://www.eurekadevsecops.com/agile-devops-and-the-threat-modeling-disconnect-bridging-the-ga...
Jun 17, 2025•1 hr 8 min
CISA has been championing Secure by Design principles. Many of the principles are universal, like adopting MFA and having opinionated defaults that reduce the need for hardening guides. Matthew Rogers talks about how the approach to Secure by Design has to be tailored for Operational Technology (OT) systems. These systems have strict requirements on safety and many of them rely on protocols that are four (or more!) decades old. He explains how the considerations in this space go far beyond just ...
Jun 10, 2025•1 hr 9 min
The recent popularity of MCPs is surpassed only by the recent examples deficiencies of their secure design. The most obvious challenge is how MCPs, and many more general LLM use cases, have erased two decades of security principles behind separating code and data. We take a look at how developers are using LLMs to generate code and continue our search for where LLMs are providing value to appsec. We also consider what indicators we'd look for as signs of success. For example, are LLMs driving us...
Jun 03, 2025•39 min
ArmorCode unveils Anya—the first agentic AI virtual security champion designed specifically for AppSec and product security teams. Anya brings together conversation and context to help AppSec, developers and security teams cut through the noise, prioritize risks, and make faster, smarter decisions across code, cloud, and infrastructure. Built into the ArmorCode ASPM Platform and backed by 25B findings, 285+ integrations, natural language intelligence, and role-aware insights, Anya turns complexi...
May 27, 2025•1 hr 5 min
In the news, Coinbase deals with bribes and insider threat, the NCSC notes the cross-cutting problem of incentivizing secure design, we cover some research that notes the multitude of definitions for secure design, and discuss the new Cybersecurity Skills Framework from the OpenSSF and Linux Foundation. Then we share two more sponsored interviews from this year's RSAC Conference. With more types of identities, machines, and agents trying to access increasingly critical data and resources, across...
May 20, 2025•1 hr 2 min
Developers are relying on LLMs as coding assistants, so where are the LLM assistants for appsec? The principles behind secure code reviews don't really change based on who write the code, whether human or AI. But more code means more reasons for appsec to scale its practices and figure out how to establish trust in code, packages, and designs. Rey Bango shares his experience with secure code reviews and where developer education fits in among the adoption of LLMs. As businesses rapidly embrace S...
May 13, 2025•1 hr 10 min
We catch up on news after a week of BSidesSF and RSAC Conference. Unsurprisingly, AI in all its flavors, from agentic to gen, was inescapable. But perhaps more surprising (and more unfortunate) is how much the adoption of LLMs has increased the attack surface within orgs. The news is heavy on security issues from MCPs and a novel alignment bypass against LLMs. Not everything is genAI as we cover some secure design topics from the Airborne attack against Apple's AirPlay to more calls for companie...
May 06, 2025•1 hr 3 min
In this live recording from BSidesSF we explore the factors that influence a secure design, talk about how to avoid the bite of UX dragons, and why designs should put classes of vulns into dungeons. But we can't threat model a secure design forever and we can't oversimplify guidance for a design to be "more secure". Kalyani Pawar and Jack Cable join the discussion to provide advice on evaluating secure designs through examples of strong and weak designs we've seen over the years. We highlight th...
Apr 29, 2025•44 min
Secrets end up everywhere, from dev systems to CI/CD pipelines to services, certificates, and cloud environments. Vlad Matsiiako shares some of the tactics that make managing secrets more secure as we discuss the distinctions between secure architectures, good policies, and developer friendly tools. We've thankfully moved on from forced 90-day user password rotations, but that doesn't mean there isn't a place for rotating secrets. It means that the tooling and processes for ephemeral secrets sho...
Apr 22, 2025•1 hr 3 min
The breaches will continue until appsec improves. Janet Worthington and Sandy Carielli share their latest research on breaches from 2024, WAFs in 2025, and where secure by design fits into all this. WAFs are delivering value in a way that orgs are relying on them more for bot management and fraud detection. But adopting phishing-resistant authentication solutions like passkeys and deploying WAFs still seem peripheral to secure by design principles. We discuss what's necessary for establishing a ...
Apr 15, 2025•1 hr 15 min
We have a top ten list entry for Insecure Design, pledges to CISA's Secure by Design principles, and tons of CVEs that fall into familiar categories of flaws. But what does it mean to have a secure design and how do we get there? There are plenty of secure practices that orgs should implement are supply chains, authentication, and the SDLC. Those practices address important areas of risk, but only indirectly influence a secure design. We look at tactics from coding styles to design councils as w...
Apr 08, 2025•1 hr 8 min
We take advantage of April Fools to look at some of appsec's myths, mistakes, and behaviors that lead to bad practices. It's easy to get trapped in a status quo of chasing CVEs or discussing which direction to shift security. But scrutinizing decimal points in CVSS scores or rearranging tools misses the opportunity for more strategic thinking. We satirize some worst practices in order to have a more serious discussion about a future where more software is based on secure designs. Segment resourc...
Apr 01, 2025•1 hr 11 min
LLMs are helping devs write code, but is it secure code? How are LLMs helping appsec teams? Keith Hoodlet returns to talk about where he's seen value from genAI, where it fits in with tools like source code analysis and fuzzers, and where its limitations mean we'll be relying on humans for a while. Those limitations don't mean appsec should dismiss LLMs as a tool. It means appsec should understand how things like context windows might limit a tool's security analysis to a few files, leaving a se...
Mar 25, 2025•54 min
The crypto world is rife with smart contracts that have been outsmarted by attackers, with consequences in the millions of dollars (and more!). Shashank shares his research into scanning contracts for flaws, how the classes of contract flaws have changed in the last few years, and how optimistic we can be about the future of this space. Segment Resources: https://scs.owasp.org https://scs.owasp.org/sctop10/ https://solidityscan.com/web3hackhub https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com Visit https://www.s...
Mar 18, 2025•53 min
Just three months into 2025 and we already have several hundred CVEs for XSS and SQL injection. Appsec has known about these vulns since the late 90s. Common defenses have been known since the early 2000s. Jack Cable talks about CISA's Secure by Design principles and how they're trying to refocus businesses on addressing vuln classes and prioritizing software quality -- with security one of those important dimensions of quality. Segment Resources: https://www.cisa.gov/securebydesign https://www....
Mar 11, 2025•1 hr 14 min
Curl and libcurl are everywhere. Not only has the project maintained success for almost three decades now, but it's done that while being written in C. Daniel Stenberg talks about the challenges in dealing with appsec, the design philosophies that keep it secure, and fostering a community to create one of the most recognizable open source projects in the world. Segment Resources: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/01/23/cvss-is-dead-to-us/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands...
Mar 04, 2025•1 hr 9 min
Minimizing latency, increasing performance, and reducing compile times are just a part of what makes a development environment better. Throw in useful tests and some useful security tools and you have an even better environment. Dan Moore talks about what motivates some developers to prefer a "local first" approach as we walk through what all of this means for security. Applying forgivable vs. unforgivable criteria to reDoS vulns, what backdoors in LLMs mean for trust in building software, consi...
Feb 25, 2025•1 hr 10 min
We're getting close to two full decades of celebrating web hacking techniques. James Kettle shares which was his favorite, why the list is important to the web hacking community, and what inspires the kind of research that makes it onto the list. We discuss why we keep seeing eternal flaws like XSS and SQL injection making these lists year after year and how clever research is still finding new attack surfaces in old technologies. But there's a lot of new web technology still to be examined, fro...
Feb 18, 2025•45 min
Code scanning is one of the oldest appsec practices. In many cases, simple grep patterns and some fancy regular expressions are enough to find many of the obvious software mistakes. Scott Norberg shares his experience with encountering code scanners that didn't find the .NET vuln classes he needed to find and why that led him to creating a scanner from scratch. We talk about some challenges in testing tools, making smart investments in engineering time, and why working with .NET's compiler made ...
Feb 11, 2025•1 hr 13 min
Threat modeling has been in the appsec toolbox for decades. But it hasn't always been used and it hasn't always been useful. Sandy Carielli shares what she's learned from talking to orgs about what's been successful, and what's failed, when they've approached this practice. Akira Brand joins to talk about her direct experience with building threat models with developers. Speculative data flow attacks demonstrated against Apple chips with SLAP and FLOP, the design and implementation choices that ...
Feb 04, 2025•1 hr 12 min
A lot of AI security boils down to the boring, but important, software security topics that appsec teams have been dealing with for decades. Niv Braun explains the distinctions between AI-related and AI-specific security as we avoid the FUD and hype of genAI to figure out where appsec teams can invest their time. He notes that data scientists have been working with ML and sensitive data sets for a long time, and it's good to have more scrutiny on what controls should be present to protect that d...
Jan 28, 2025•1 hr 9 min
What’s in store for appsec in 2025? Sure, there'll be some XSS and SQL injection, but what about trends that might influence how appsec teams plan? Cody Scott shares five cybersecurity and privacy predictions and we take a deep dive into three of them. We talk about finding value to appsec from AI, why IoT and OT need both programmatic and technical changes, and what the implications of the next XZ Utils attack might be. Segment resources: https://www.forrester.com/blogs/predictions-2025-cyberse...
Jan 21, 2025•52 min
There's a pernicious myth that developers don't care about security. In practice, they care about code quality. What developers don't care for is ambiguous requirements. Ixchel Ruiz shares her experience is discussing software designs, the challenges in prioritizing dev efforts, and how to help open source project maintainers with their issue backlog. Segment resources: https://github.com/ossf/scorecard https://www.commonhaus.org/ https://www.hackergarten.net/ Design lessons from PyPI's Quaranti...
Jan 14, 2025•1 hr 8 min
All appsec teams need quality tools and all developers benefit from appsec guidance that's focused on meaningful results. Greg Anderson shares his experience in bringing the OWASP DefectDojo project to life and maintaining its value for over a decade. He reminds us that there are tons of appsec teams with low budgets and few members that need tools to help them bring useful insights to developers. Segment Resources: https://owasp.org/www-project-defectdojo/ Three-quarters of CISOs surveyed repor...
Jan 07, 2025•1 hr 7 min
Practices around identity and managing credentials have improved greatly since the days of infosec mandating 90-day password rotations. But those improvements didn't arise from a narrow security view. Hannah Sutor talks about the importance of balancing security with usability, the importance of engaging with users when determining defaults, and setting an example for transparency in security disclosures. Segment resources https://youtu.be/ydg95R2QKwM Curl's oldest bug yet, RCPs (and more!) from...
Dec 16, 2024•1 hr 10 min
We do our usual end of year look back on the topics, news, and trends that caught our attention. We covered some OWASP projects, the ongoing attention and promises of generative AI, and big events from the XZ Utils backdoor to Microsoft's Recall to Crowdstrike's outage. Segment resources https://prods.ec https://owasp.org/www-project-spvs/ https://genai.owasp.org/resource/owasp-top-10-for-llm-applications-2025/ https://securitychampions.owasp.org/ https://deadliestwebattacks.com/appsec/2024/11/1...
Dec 10, 2024•59 min
Observability is a lot more than just sprinkling printf statements throughout a code base. Adriana Villela explains principles behind logging, traceability, and metrics and how the OpenTelemetry project helps developers gather this useful information. She also provides suggestions on starting logging from scratch, how to avoid information overload, and how engaging users about their experience with solutions like OpenTelemetry makes for better software -- a lesson that appsec teams can apply to ...
Dec 03, 2024•1 hr 11 min