In this live recording from BSidesSF we explore the factors that influence a secure design, talk about how to avoid the bite of UX dragons, and why designs should put classes of vulns into dungeons. But we can't threat model a secure design forever and we can't oversimplify guidance for a design to be "more secure". Kalyani Pawar and Jack Cable joi…

Secrets end up everywhere, from dev systems to CI/CD pipelines to services, certificates, and cloud environments. Vlad Matsiiako shares some of the tactics that make managing secrets more secure as we discuss the distinctions between secure architectures, good policies, and developer friendly tools. We've thankfully moved on from forced 90-day user…

The breaches will continue until appsec improves. Janet Worthington and Sandy Carielli share their latest research on breaches from 2024, WAFs in 2025, and where secure by design fits into all this. WAFs are delivering value in a way that orgs are relying on them more for bot management and fraud detection. But adopting phishing-resistant authentic…

We have a top ten list entry for Insecure Design, pledges to CISA's Secure by Design principles, and tons of CVEs that fall into familiar categories of flaws. But what does it mean to have a secure design and how do we get there? There are plenty of secure practices that orgs should implement are supply chains, authentication, and the SDLC. Those p…

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 s…

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…

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 Res…

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 prioritizi…

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 …

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 th…

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 ye…

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 …

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 …

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 …

What’s in store for appsec in 2025? Sure, there'll be some XSS and SQL injection, but what about trends that might influence how appsec teams plan? Cody Scott shares five cybersecurity and privacy predictions and we take a deep dive into three of them. We talk about finding value to appsec from AI, why IoT and OT need both programmatic and technica…

There's a pernicious myth that developers don't care about security. In practice, they care about code quality. What developers don't care for is ambiguous requirements. Ixchel Ruiz shares her experience is discussing software designs, the challenges in prioritizing dev efforts, and how to help open source project maintainers with their issue backl…

All appsec teams need quality tools and all developers benefit from appsec guidance that's focused on meaningful results. Greg Anderson shares his experience in bringing the OWASP DefectDojo project to life and maintaining its value for over a decade. He reminds us that there are tons of appsec teams with low budgets and few members that need tools…

Practices around identity and managing credentials have improved greatly since the days of infosec mandating 90-day password rotations. But those improvements didn't arise from a narrow security view. Hannah Sutor talks about the importance of balancing security with usability, the importance of engaging with users when determining defaults, and se…

We do our usual end of year look back on the topics, news, and trends that caught our attention. We covered some OWASP projects, the ongoing attention and promises of generative AI, and big events from the XZ Utils backdoor to Microsoft's Recall to Crowdstrike's outage. Segment resources https://prods.ec https://owasp.org/www-project-spvs/ https://…

Observability is a lot more than just sprinkling printf statements throughout a code base. Adriana Villela explains principles behind logging, traceability, and metrics and how the OpenTelemetry project helps developers gather this useful information. She also provides suggestions on starting logging from scratch, how to avoid information overload,…

This week's interview dives deep into the state of biometrics with two Forrester Research analysts! This discussion compares and contrasts regional approaches to biometrics; examine the security challenges and benefits of their implementation; and reveal how biometrics holds the keys to a range of engagement models of the future. Andras Cser dives …

In this week's interview, Melinda Marks' joins us to discuss her latest research. Her recent report Modernizing Application Security to Scale for Cloud-Native Development delves into many aspects and trends affecting AppSec as it matures, particularly in cloud-first organizations. We also discuss the fuzzy line between "cloud-native" AppSec and eve…

After spending a decade working for appsec vendors, Grant McKracken wanted to give something back. He saw a gap in the market for free or low-cost services for smaller organizations that have real appsec needs, but not a lot of means to pay for it. He founded DarkHorse, who offers VDPs and bug bounties to organizations of all sizes for free, or for…

Better TLS implementations with Rust, fuzzing, and managing certs, appsec lessons from the everlasting transition to IPv6, LLMs for finding vulns (and whether fuzzing is better), and more! Also check out this presentation from BSides Knoxville that we talked about briefly, https://youtu.be/DLn7Noex_fc?feature=shared Generative AI has been the talk …

Building cloud native apps doesn't mean you're immune to dealing with legacy systems. Cloud services have changed significantly over the last decade, both in the security controls available to them and the sheer volume of services that CSPs provide. Scott Piper shares some history of cloud security, the benefits of account separation, and how ratch…