Sundial

Photo by Mark Vihtelic on Unsplash

We’ve just crossed through the halfway point of the year.

Is your vuln backlog half empty or half full?

Do you have a better strategy than half-heartedly applying patches?

What if we turned half-measures based on checklists into full-fledged designs rooted in secure principles?

After all –

I don’t know half of this year’s CVEs half as well as I should, and I like less than half of vuln patching emphasis half as well as it deserves.

Defense-in-Depth Strategies for Securing Mobile Applications (ep. 390)

Mobile apps need resilient design strategies to ensure their business logic and workflows remain secure. We dive into a defense-in-depth discussion with Ryan Lloyd about the threats that mobile apps face, the threat models devs should reason through, and the unsurprising reasons why mobile development requires server-side controls.

I particularly like talking about flaws in business logic and workflows because their discovery requires creative thinking about potential misuse and abuse. After all, the attack payloads are almost always valid and technically correct traffic. They just happen to be hitting weaknesses in a state machine, edge cases in expectations, or a surprising sequence of steps that developers didn't anticipate.

This interview was sponsored by GuardSquare.

Discovering & Securing Your AI Agent Attack Surface (ep. 391)

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 frames the OWASP LLM Top 10 into five layers in order to understand and prioritize their attack surface.

Similar to securing APIs, having a solid foundation of observability and identity makes it easier to avoid unexpected activity from agents and to set boundaries on their behavior. That's especially important for constraining prompt injection and excessive agency.

Prompt injection is the unexpected activity that most orgs are likely to get an unpleasant surprise from. But unbounded consumption runs a close second. And that unbounded consumption can come from surprising areas. We talked a bit about using LLMs to evaluate intent and output handling, but burning more tokens to check security outcomes from burning other tokens isn't always the most reliable or efficient solution. And that's where we're looking for more interesting and useful appsec approaches.

MacOS Security Design Features, Flaws, And Futures (ep. 392)

Appsec often frames usability and security requirements as at odds with each other. Apple's software has famously emphasized the importance of usability while also establishing 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 sees plenty of opportunity for more security research. In fact, you'll be able to catch more of his research at this year's Black Hat and DEF CON!

We discuss how developers make defensible design choices and a few security principles that any app developer should keep in mind regardless of their programming language or operating system.

Inside the OWASP Agent Security Regression Harness Project (ep. 393)

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 project intends to grow. Importantly, we also talk about the security controls and designs that orgs can build around the systems and data that models interact with in addition to evaluating the security of the agents and agent harnesses themselves.

Subscribe to catch these episodes and more! Then go check out the previous recap.