Open Source Security
Open Source Security is a media project to help showcase and educate on open source security. Our goal is to give the community a platform educate both developers and users on how open source security works. There’s a lot of good work happening that doesn’t get attention because there’s no marketing department behind it, they don’t have a developer relations team posting on LinkedIn every two hours. Let’s focus on those people and teams then learn what they do and how they do it. The goal is to hear from the people doing the work, they know what’s up, they have a lot to teach us. We just have to listen.
Episodes
I'm joined by Philippe Ombredanne, creator of the Package URL (PURL), to discuss the surprisingly complex and messy problem of simply identifying open source software packages. We dive into how PURLs provide a universal, common-sense standard that is becoming essential for the future of SBOMs and securing the software supply chain.
The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at
https://opensourcesecurity.io/2025/202...
Thomas DePierre joins Open Source Security to discuss the central idea from his blog post, "You are all on the hobbyist maintainers turf now," exploring the massive disconnect between the corporate world that consumes open source and the hobbyist community that actually produces it. The conversation reveals this isn't a new problem, but a long-standing reality whose consequences for security, stability, and the future of software w...
I chat with Aaron Lippold, creator of MITRE's Security Automation Framework (SAF), to discuss how to escape the pain of manual STIG compliance. We explore the technical details of open-source tools like InSpec, Heimdall, and Vulcan that automate validation, normalize diverse security data, and streamline the entire security authoring process.
The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at
https://opensourcesecurity....
I recently chatted with Andrew Nesbitt about his project, Ecosyste.ms. Ecosyste.ms catalogs open source projects by tracking packages, dependencies, repositories, and more. With this dataset Andrew is able to incredible insights into the world of open source. We chat all about how Ecosyste.ms works and how he manages to wrangle all this data.
The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at
https://opensourcesecurity....
Daniel Stenberg, the maintainer of Curl, discusses the increase in AI security reports that are wasting the time of maintainers. We discuss Curl's new policy of banning the bad actors while establishing some pretty sane AI usage guidelines. We chat about how this low-effort, high-impact abuse pattern is a denial-of-service attack on the curl project (and other open source projects too).
The show notes and blog post for this episode...
I recently had a chat with Kairo about a project he maintains called Repository Service for TUF (RSTUF). We explain why TUF is tough (har har har), what RSTUF can do, and some of the challenges around securing repositories.
The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at
https://opensourcesecurity.io/2025/2025-05-rstuf-with-kairo-de-araujo/
William Woodruff discussed his project, Zizmor, a security linter designed to help developers identify and fix vulnerabilities within their GitHub Actions workflows. This tool addresses inherent security risks in GitHub Actions, such as injection vulnerabilities, permission issues, and mutable tags, by providing static analysis and remediation guidance. Fresh off the heels of the tj-actions/changed-files backdoor, this is a great t...
Recently, I had the pleasure of chatting with Paul Asadoorian, Principal Security Researcher at Eclypsium and the host of the legendary Paul's Security Weekly podcast. Our conversation dove into the often-murky waters of embedded systems and the Internet of Things (IoT), sparked by a specific vulnerability discussion on Paul's show concerning reference code for the popular ESP32 microcontroller.
The show notes and blog post for thi...
Dimitri Stiliadis, CTO from Endor Labs, discusses the recent tj-actions/changed-files supply chain attack, where a compromised GitHub Action exposed CI/CD secrets. We explore the impressive multi-stage attack vector and the broader often-overlooked vulnerabilities in our CI/CD pipelines, emphasizing the need to treat these build systems with production-level security rigor instead of ignoring them.
The show notes and blog post fo...
I chat with Alan Pope about the open source security tools Syft, Grype, and Grant. These tools help create Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) and scan for vulnerabilities. Learn why generating and storing SBOMs is crucial for understanding your software supply chain and quickly responding to new threats like Log4Shell.
The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at
https://opensourcesecurity.io/2025/2025-04-syft-gr...
Aaron Frost explores the overly complex world of vulnerability identifiers for end of life software. We discuss how incomplete CVE reporting creates blind spots for users while arming attackers with knowledge. The conversation uncovers the ethical tensions between resource constraints and security transparency, highlighting why the "vulnerable until proven otherwise" approach is the best path forward for end of life software.
The s...
Cargo Semver Checks is a Rust tool by Predrag Gruevski that is tackling the problem of broken dependencies that cost developers time when trying to upgrade dependencies. Predrag's work shows how automated checks can catch breaking changes before they're released, potentially saving projects from unexpected failures and making dependency updates less painful across the entire Rust ecosystem.
The show notes and blog post for this epi...
Lars Wirzenius discusses his innovative CI/CD system Ambient, which uses isolated virtual machines without network access to enhance security, and his work on Radicle, a peer-to-peer Git collaboration platform. Together, these projects offer a glimpse into a more distributed future for software development, addressing key challenges in current CI/CD systems like long wait times, security vulnerabilities, and centralized infrastruct...
William Brown tells us all about how confusing and complicated the FIDO authentication universe is. He talks about WebAuthn implementation challenges to flaws in the FIDO metadata service that affect how hardware tokens are authenticated against. The conversation covers the spectrum of hardware security key quality, attestation mechanisms, and the barriers preventing open source developers from improving industry standards despite ...
In this episode, open source legal expert Luis Villa breaks down what the EU's Cyber Resilience Act means for developers and businesses, exploring carve-outs for individual contributors and the complex relationship between security and sustainability. Luis provides practical guidance on navigating this evolving regulatory landscape while explaining why the CRA represents both a challenge and an opportunity for the open source ecosy...
Brian Fox discusses findings from a recent Sonatype report about the growing challenge of malicious packages in open source repositories. At the time of recording there are now over 820,000 malware packages in public repositories. Brian explains why certain ecosystems are more vulnerable than others and how behavioral detection methods can identify suspicious packages, and the challenge in solving this problem.
The blog post for th...
In this episode Open Source Security talks to Dr. Kelly Masada about the Open Information Security Foundation (OISF). The way OISF is managing Suricata through a foundation is ...
In this episode Open Source Security chats with Sheogorath about HedgeDoc project's journey from HackMD to CodiMD and finally to HedgeDoc. We learn what forking a project looks like, including license changes (MIT to AGPL), security vulnerability management across different codebases, naming challenges, and infrastructure migrations. The conversation goes through to journey from HackMD to CodiMD and all the lessons learned along th...
In this episode, Open Source Security chats with Aaron Frost, CEO of Hero Devs about the world of maintaining end-of-life open source software. Aaron explains how EOL versions of open source work and how backporting security fixes can help maintaining compliance. In the discussion we cover the "just upgrade" mentality, how backporting works, why it's hard, and why it matters. We also cover some oddities the world of CVE brings to t...
François Proulx, a supply chain security researcher at Boost Security, discusses how continuous integration (CI) and build pipeline security represents a critical and overlooked hole in our supply chain security. It seems like most supply chain compromises are actually from CI system breaches rather than direct code compromise, yet we seem to obsess over everything on either side of the CI system. François has a bunch of really goo...
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