Open Source Security Podcast

Josh and Kurt talk about the Krebs blog post titled "When in Doubt: Hang Up, Look Up, & Call Back". In the world of security there isn't a lot of actionable advice, it's worth discussing if something like this will work, or ever if it's the right way to handle these situations.

Josh and Kurt talk about what beer and reproducible builds have in common. It's a lot more than you think, and it mostly comes down to quality control. If you can't reproduce what you do, you're not a mature organization and you need maturity to have quality.

Josh and Kurt talk about automatic updates. Specifically we discuss a recent decision by Ubuntu to enable forced automatic updates. There are lessons here for the security community. We have a history of jumping to solutions rather than defining and understanding problems. Sometimes our solutions aren't the best. Also murder bees.

Josh and Kurt talk about the uproar around Cloudflare's "Is BGP safe yet" site. It's always interesting watching how much people will push back on new things, even if the new things is probably a step in the right direction. The clever thing Cloudflare is doing in this instance is they are making the BGP problem something anyone can understand. Also send us your funny dog stories.

Josh and Kurt talk about the new normal that's working away from an office. It's not exactly working from home as there are some unforeseen challenges that we just took for granted in the past. There are a lot of new and strange security problems we have to adapt to, everyone is doing amazing work with very little right now.

Josh and Kurt talk about space. We intended to focus on Apollo 13 but as usual we have no ability to stay on topic. There is a lot of fun space discussions in this one though. Do you think you can hack Voyager 1? Only if you have a big enough satellite dish.

Josh and Kurt talk about Kurt's recent treadmill purchase and the lessons we can lean in security from the consumer market. The consumer market has learned a lot about how to interact with their customers in the last few decades, the security industry is certainly behind in this space today. Once again we display our ability to tie even the seemingly mundane things back to a discussion about security.

Josh and Kurt talk about security scanners. They're all pretty bad today, but there are some things we can do to make them better. Step one is to understand the problem. Do you know why you're running the scanner and what the reports mean?

Josh and Kurt talk about building a talent ecosystem. What starts out as an attempt by Kurt to talk about Canada evolves into a discussion about how talent can evolve, or be purposely grown. Canada's entertainment industry and Unit 8200 are good examples of this.

Josh and Kurt talk about video games and hacking. Specifically how speed runners are really just video game hackers.

Josh and Kurt talk about video games. Yeah, video games. Specifically about cheating in video games. There's a lot of other security themes in the discussion. With the news being horrible these days, we needed to talk about something fun.

Josh and Kurt talk about Wireguard. There have been a lot of recent conversations about it and if it's better or worse than other VPN solutions. It's safe to say in our modern age, less is usually more, especially when it comes to security. Wireguard has a lot going for it, it can't be ignored.

Josh and Kurt talk to Tony Meehan from Elastic (formerly Endgame) about endpoint detection, response, protection, and even SIEM. Tony has a great history coming from the NSA and has a number of great stories to help understand the topics.

Josh and Kurt talk about the Linux Foundation Census 2. There is a lot of talk around how to fix open source security, but the reality is we can't fix it. We need to stop trying to fix what isn't broken and engineering around the system we have, not the system we want.

Josh and Kurt talk about the sale of the corp.com domain. Is it going to be the end of the world, or a non event? We disagree on what should happen with it. Josh hopes an evildoer buys it, Kurt hopes for Microsoft. We also briefly discuss the CIA owning Crypto AG.