Application Security Weekly (Audio)

AppSec has always emphasized techniques and tools for discovering vulns, along with taxonomies and lists for describing them. But just piling up more CVEs into a prioritized patching queue has never been an effective strategy. Nidhi Aggarwal talks about some of the economics and decisions that orgs evaluate when figuring out how to improve and protect their software. LLMs might be effective assistants in generating code, but only w...

Sandboxing, least privilege, and monitoring are well-established controls in terms of the defenses they provide against unexpected and unauthorized actions. But being well-established in theory doesn't always translate to successful in practice. Kieran Human talks about some of the properties that a good sandbox should have and how monitoring creates a feedback loop to refine allow lists and access controls. In practice, the potent...

All sorts of cybersecurity disciplines are adopting agents to help humans save time and automate routine activities. Sai Kiran Uppu describes his work on creating a platform for agents to analyze external threat intel, examine internal systems, and present triage decisions to operators. This type of work is especially useful to orgs that deal with petabytes of data and thousands of systems. And, as Kiran notes, it's important to ke...

Finding flaws has always been a focus of appsec. And now with open source projects and open weight models orgs have modern tools to review code and conduct pentests. Rishi Sharma describes the motivation behind creating a platform of LLM-driven security tools and the effective ways to keep the tools in scope, on budget, and for engineering teams. We talk about how prompts influence LLM activity, as well as the external constraints ...

There's already an increase in volume of security flaws found by LLMs. And orgs are already turning to LLMs to write code. So, what happens when orgs lean on LLMs to create patches for those security flaws? Keith Hoodlet gives an exclusive early look at his team's recent research into the success, quality, and failures of LLM-generated security patches. Notably, they saw scenarios across a spectrum from robust, effective patches to...

Orgs need to be able to use agents, MCPs, and LLMs in ways that don't lead to unexpected actions and undesirable outcomes. The OWASP Agent Security Regression Harness project is an approach for defining customizable scenarios and testing whether those systems fail against known security threats. Mert Saltimaz talks about the background of the project, how orgs can use it as they bring more LLMs into their environment, and how the p...

Appsec often frames usability and security as at odds with each other. Apple's software has famously emphasized the importance of usability while also creating a solid security foundation. Patrick Wardle talks about how he's seen malware shift from Windows to macOS, how Apple's aggressive stance on deprecation benefits security, and the areas of the OS where he still sees plenty of opportunity for more security research. We discuss...

While LLMs and agents are new to appsec and everyone else, a lot of AI security requirements translate to well-known API security requirements. Jeremy Snyder helps us frame the OWASP LLM Top 10 into five layers in order to help orgs understand and prioritize their attack surface. A lot of orgs don't have to deal with model-specific threats or building their own GPU architecture, but every org adopting LLMs and agents should be awar...

Mobile applications have unique risks and threat models compared to server-side applications and infrastructure. Consequently, they need different strategies to ensure their business logic and workflows well secured. We'll dive into some of these defense-in-depth strategies and why they are important to mobile applications. Securing workflows goes beyond input validation and pattern matching suspicious payloads; it requires detaile...

SquidBleed reveals another vuln that's been lurking for decades, but its real lesson is in managing an attack surface. Regardless of whatever programming language you use, removing code is one of the best security steps you can take, followed by changing default configs to turn off uncommon features and ancient protocols.

The Linux kernel's removal of strncpy is another example of managing attack surface by replacing a notoriously ...

Appsec has seen machine identities from daemons and processes to services, microservices, and cloud accounts. And now we have agents. Ev Kontsevoy talks about what it means to have engineers and agents interacting in an environment, and why a focus on actions can be more effective than roles. One of the biggest challenges in securing agents along with all of the other identities that organizations manage is how fragmented that mana...

Agents and LLMs are creating and reviewing code. They're a new tool to help developers write software and they're a new abstraction layer for expressing what code should do. But if we're focused on determining whether code is secure, where do we focus our attention on ensuring a secure outcome? Matias Madou talks about the challenges of finding metrics to help answer these questions. We walk through many of the questions we'd like ...

Most AppSec teams are working through more findings than their teams can validate. SAST surfaces thousands of potential issues. DAST generates alert volume that outpaces triage capacity. Somewhere in that output are the vulnerabilities that matter, the ones that are actually exploitable in production. This conversation explores why automated testing often stops short of the hardest part of the job: proving what is real. We dig into...

We dedicate an episode to catching up on appsec news with Kalyani Pawar. We see parsing problems that led to the BadHost vuln, which exposed lots of LLMs, MCPs, and agents to potential compromise. We wonder where to look for security education and practice as the camaraderie of the CTF community becomes infiltrated by LLMs. We talk about the tradeoffs in trust between using public packages vs. having agents write replacements from ...

We showcase recordings from this year's RSAC.

At RSAC Conference 2026, Scott Clinton, Co-Chair and co-founder of the OWASP GenAI Security Project, shares insights from the project's latest research, including new landscape guides and evolving approaches to securing generative and agentic AI systems. The conversation explores critical gaps in GenAI data security, the rise of AI-assisted development, and the immense growth of the OWA...

This year has been a dichotomy of established secure design fundamentals and burgeoning chaos of LLM-driven vuln discovery. Keith Hoodlet returns to share his latest observations on what the recent news about Mythos, models, and harnesses means for appsec. He walks through the problems of misalignment, the potential development doom that looms behind a volume of vulns, and what modern code creation looks like. Along the way we touc...

If you have to ditch your entire appsec strategy because you expect 2026 to bring more vulns more quickly, then you probably didn't have a good strategy in the first place. Rob Allen shares how the mentality of "assume breach" doesn't have to be a defeatist attitude and can instead be a way to change a catastrophic breach into a more contained one. We also talk about proactive security and what an "avoid breach" attitude could look...

Speed is the most common theme among developers and appsec teams working with LLMs and agents, from trying to keep up with patterns for deploying agents to dealing with more code faster to how the latest models impact code quality and security. The OWASP GenAI Project is helping organizations keep up with the speed of those changes and engaging the appsec community for sharing effective ways to keep systems secure. Scott Clinton sh...

Portswigger's list of web hacking techniques is a long-running celebration of curiosity and research from the web hacking community. James Kettle shares his thoughts on the entries from 2025 and how he expects LLMs and agents to influence what the list will look like for next year. He also shares some insights on using LLMs for his own blackbox research, giving us a peek into the work he'll be sharing at Black Hat USA this summer.

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