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 resources: https://bsidessf2025.sched.com/event/1x8ST/secure-designs-ux-dragons-vuln-dungeons-application-security-weekly https://bsidessf2025.sched.com/event/1x8TU/preparing-for-dragons-dont-sharpen-swords-set-traps-gather-supplies https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514.html https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149.html Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-324

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 security architecture review to humans. Segment resources: https://securing.dev/posts/ai-security-reasoning-and-bias/ https://seclists.org/dailydave/2025/q1/0 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16165 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05229 https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2025/thoughts-on-future-ai.html Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-323

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.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-322

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.cisa.gov/securebydesign/pledge https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/product-security-bad-practices https://www.lawfaremedia.org/projects-series/reviews-essays/security-by-design https://corridor.dev Skype hangs up for good, over a million cheap Android devices may be backdoored, parallels between jailbreak research and XSS, impersonating AirTags, network reconnaissance via a memory disclosure vuln in the GFW, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-321

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-for-intelligence/ https://thenewstack.io/curls-daniel-stenberg-on-securing-180000-lines-of-c-code/ Google replacing SMS with QR codes for authentication, MS pulls a VSCode extension due to red flags, threat modeling with TRAIL, threat modeling the Bybit hack, malicious models and malicious AMIs, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-320

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, considering some secure AI architectures to minimize prompt injection impact, developer reactions to Rust, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-319

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, from HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 to WebAssembly. Segment Resources: Top 10, 2024: https://portswigger.net/research/top-10-web-hacking-techniques-of-2024 Full nomination list: https://portswigger.net/research/top-10-web-hacking-techniques-of-2024-nominations-open Project overview: https://portswigger.net/research/top-10-web-hacking-techniques Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-318

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 his decisions easier. Segment Resources: -https://github.com/ScottNorberg-NCG/CodeSheriff.NET Identifying and eradicating unforgivable vulns, an unforgivable flaw (and a few others) in DeepSeek's iOS app, academics and industry looking to standardize principles and practices for memory safety, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-317

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 led to OCSP's demise, an appsec angle on AI, updating the threat model and recommendations for implementing OAuth 2.0, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-316

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 data. This segment is sponsored by Noma Security. Visit https://securityweekly.com/noma to learn more about them! An open source security project forks in response to license changes (and an echo of how we've been here before), car hacking via spectacularly insecure web apps, hacking a synth via spectacularly cool MIDI messages, cookie parsing problems, the RANsacked paper of 100+ LTE/5G vulns found from fuzzing, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-315