Open Source Security

Josh has a discussion with Vlad-Stefan Harbuz about the Open Source Pledge as well as his recent FOSDEM talk. The Open Source Pledge is all about trying to build a sustainable universe for open source maintainers. This ties into Vlad's FOSDEM talk which was all about the challenge of just knowing what open source you are using. The importance of trying to make open source sustainable is a really important topic, but i...

Josh welcomes back David Bernstein to talk about creating a disaster recover plan. It's a very timely topic given all the current events. There are more supply chain attacks and compromises than ever before. There are some great resources for this planning, but as David tells us, it's really not that hard to put some plans together. It's easy to over-plan, David gives some great tips on getting started with our planning for an even...

Josh talks to Paul McCarty of Open Source Malware about ... open source malware. Paul explains why there aren't many good open source malware datasets. We discuss why the existing data is lacking for many use cases. We of course touch on AI and the malware in skills problems and challenges. It's a fun discussion with a lot of new and interesting problems we all have to deal with.

The show notes and blog post for this episode can be...

Josh welcomes back Andrew Nesbitt to discuss some recent blog posts he wrote about the challenges of new ecosystems as well as challenges of no ecosystems like C. There aren't very many people who look at multiple ecosystems in the way Andrew does. He has thoughts on why it's so hard to create a new ecosystem as well as some of the reasons we don't see a C language ecosystem. Andrew has a ton of interesting ideas and insight for us...

Josh talks to Michael Winser about a talk he gave at FOSDEM as well as his work on Alpha Omega at the Linux Foundation. Michael is approaching open source security in a way that nobody has ever tried before. What if we could fund some really big, really hard projects? It's not cheap or easy, but he's getting it done. We spend a lot of the time discussing package registries, which are a huge topic. Michael is doing som...

Josh chats with Brian Fox from Sonatype about their 2026 State of the Software Supply Chain report. Most of the number continue to grow at alarming rates, but there's some new interesting findings in this one. We discuss end of life and open source which is tough to define. We touch on what using AI with open source dependencies looks like (and why it's broken), and we discuss the challenge of upgrading your open sour...

Josh talks to Luke Hinds, CEO of Always Further, about MCP and agent security. We start out talking about Luke's new tool, nono which is a sandboxing tool that has AI agents in mind as a use case. We explain what MCP and agents are doing as well as why it's so hard to secure them. It's not impossible, but it's not simple either. We end the show by discussing some of the more human aspects to security and how history m...

Josh talks to Paul Kehrer and Alex Gaynor, from the Python Cryptographic Authority. Alex and Paul recently published a statement discuss the challenges posed by modern OpenSSL. We discuss the statement and their relationship with OpenSSL. We chat about some of the current features in cryptography, as well as some of what's coming in the future. It's a fun conversation that hits on a lot of great points.

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Josh talks to Sylvestre Ledru about the Rust coreutils project. We've been using GNU coreutils for decades now, and the goal of Rust coreutils is to rewrite these utilities in Rust. The primary reason isn't security, it's to modernize the code and attract new contributors. Sylvestre discusses with quite pleasant relationship with the GNU coreutils developers, some of the challenges in the project. What Ubuntu using th...

Josh chats with Brad Axen from Block about his creation Goose as well as the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). I am quite skeptical of many AI claims, but Brad has a very pragmatic view about where things are today and where we might see them head. Donating Goose to the AAIF is great news as well as seeing MCP and AGENTS.MD in the foundation. We discuss how to deal with the problem of raising up junior developers, challen...

Josh chats with Olle E. Johansson about the Global Vulnerability Intelligence Platform (GVIP). It's no secret the current vulnerability systems are reaching a breaking point. Olle is one of the few people with a long term vision instead of trying to just fix the short term problems. His GVIP ideas are very good, but it's a community effort and needs our help. Give it a listen and if it sounds interesting, come help us...

Josh talk to the founder and CEO of Nextcloud, Frank Karlitschek about digital sovereignty. There's a lot of attention lately around digital sovereignty and often that conversation also includes Nextcloud. Frank tells us all about how Nextcloud works, how it can be used to free your data, and has some great insight into what decentralization already looks like and what it could look like soon.

The show n...

Josh talks to David Bernstein about the world of crisis management and business continuity. David is a certified emergency manager and tell us about preparing for both digital and physical disruptions. Everything is IT now, so the way we think about disaster preparedness is changing. We talk about understanding risks, creating plans, and the role of practice in the world of crisis management. This is a super interesting universe an...

William Brown is back! This time Josh chats with him about Passkeys. WTF are they? A Passkey is a form of multi factor authentication, but it's not super obvious what that really means. William does a fantastic job explaining what a Passkey is, how we got to where we are today with Passkeys. He shares a ton of explanations about the whole world of authentication along the way. Some of this stuff is basically magic.

Josh discusses Suricata with Victor Julien, the founder and lead developer of the project. Victor explains the history of the project, its impact on cybersecurity, and the community that keeps it all running. Challenges like encrypted traffic and the evolution of open-source projects. Victor even gives us a glimpse into what he sees as the future of the project. There's a lot to learn about Suricata in this one.

Josh talks to Gergely Nagy (algernon) about his tool Iocaine. Iocaine creates a maze to trap scraping bots in a world a fake pages they cannot escape. algernon tells us how Iocaine effectively traps bots by serving them endless loops of nonsensical URLs and web pages. It's an extremely clever tool that's designed to be completely hidden from normal users, but not hidden to the scrapers.

The show notes an...

Josh chats with Xe Iaso, the creator of Anubis the web AI firewall. We discuss how Anubis is tackling bots and scrapers. The discussion around the scrapers is fascinating and challenging, these things are everywhere and don't behave very nicely. There's also discussion about running a successful open source project. Xe has a lot of experience to share with us, you're going to learn something new with this one.

Josh talk to Dirkjan and Joe about Rustls (pronounced rustles), a Rust-based TLS library. Dirkjan and Joe are developers on Rustls. We talk about the history that got us to this point. The many many challenges in writing a TLS library (Rust or not). We also chat about some of what's to come. Rustls has an OpenSSL compatibility layer which makes is a really interesting project.

The show notes and blog pos...

Josh welcomes back Daniel Thompson explore the rather silly question of whether Santa Claus needs to be compliant with the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). This episode was intended to be silly, but it ended up being an incredibly interesting conversation. Daniel explained a great deal about how the CRA works and how it could apply to Santa Claus. The TL;DR is even if he's giving out free stuff, the CRA almost certainly ap...