Application Security Weekly (Audio)

Erik Nost, a Senior Analyst at Forrester focused on proactive security and attack surface management, discusses shifting from frantic patching to forward-looking practices. He covers visibility, prioritization, and remediation. He explains why remediation often feels reactive, how AI changes discovery and defense, and practical quick wins like reducing credential theft.

What happens when secure coding guidance goes stale? What happens LLMs write code from scratch? Mark Curphy walks us through his experience updating documentation for writing secure code in Go and recreating one of his own startups. One of the themes of this conversation is how important documentation is, whether it's intended for humans or for prompts to LLMs. Importantly, LLMs don't innovate on their own -- they rely on the data they're trained on. And that means there should be good authoritative sources for what secure code looks like. It also means that instructions to LLMs need to be clear and precise enough to produce something useful. Watch what happens when Mark prompts his agents to run a live demo for us! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-374

Medical devices are a special segment of the IoT world where availability and patient safety are paramount. Tamil Mathi explains why many devices need to fail open -- the opposite of what traditional appsec approaches might initially think -- and what makes threat modeling these devices interesting and unique. He also covers how to get started in this space, from where to learn hardware hacking basics to reviewing firmware and moving up the stack to the application layer. Segment Resources: https://www.defconbiohackingvillage.org https://medium.com/@tamilmathimaddytamilthurai/securing-the-future-of-iot-with-trusted-execution-environments-tees-a-secure-scalable-and-1376f94e755c Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-373

As more developers turn to LLMs to generate code, more appsec teams are turning to LLMs to conduct security code reviews. One of the biggest themes in all the discussion around LLMs, agents, and code is speed -- more code created faster. James Wickett shares why speed continues to pose a challenge to appsec teams and why that's often because teams haven't invested enough in foundational appsec principles. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-372

Journalists put a lot of effort into collecting information and protecting their sources, but everyone can benefit from having a digital environment that's more secure and more privacy protecting. Runa Sandvik shares her experience working with journalists and targeted groups to craft plans for how they use their devices and manage their information. And she also makes the point that the burden of security should not be just for users -- platforms and software providers should be evaluating secure defaults and secure designs that improve protections for everyone. Resources https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/apples-lockdown-mode-is-good-for-security-but-its-notifications-are-baffling/ https://www.glitchcat.xyz/p/lessons-learned-from-the-2021-arrest https://gijn.org/resource/introduction-investigative-journalism-digital-security/ https://cpj.org/ Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-371

A major premise of appsec is figuring out effective ways to answer the question, "What security flaws are in this code?" The nature of the question doesn't really change depending on who or what wrote the code. In other words, LLMs writing code really just means there's mode code to secure. So, what about using LLMs to find security flaws? Just how effective and efficient are they? We talk with Adrian Sanabria and John Kinsella about the latest appsec articles that show a range of results from finding memory corruption bugs in open source software to spending an inordinate amount of manual effort validating persuasive, but ultimately incorrect, security findings from an LLM. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-370

When it comes to agents and MCPs, the interesting security discussion isn't that they need strong authentication and authorization, but what that authn/z story should look like, where does it get implemented, and who implements it. Dan Moore shares the useful parallels in securing APIs that should be brought into the world of MCPs -- especially because so many are still interacting with APIs. Resources https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/01/21/is-that-allowed-authentication-and-authorization-in-model-context-protocol/ https://fusionauth.io/articles/identity-basics/authorization-models Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-369

Everyone is turning to LLMs to generate code, including attackers. Thus, it's no great surprise that there are now examples of malware generated by LLMs. We discuss the implications of more malware with Rob Allen and what it means for orgs that want to protect themselves from ransomware. Resources https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/voidlink-cloud-malware-shows-clear-signs-of-being-ai-generated/ https://research.checkpoint.com/2026/voidlink-early-ai-generated-malware-framework/ https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/threat-actor-usage-of-ai-tools/ This segment is sponsored by ThreatLocker. Visit https://securityweekly.com/threatlocker to learn more about them! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-368

Supply chain security remains one of the biggest time sinks for appsec teams and developers, even making it onto the latest iteration of the OWASP Top 10 list. Paul Davis joins us to talk about strategies to proactively defend your environment from the different types of attacks that target supply chains and package dependencies. We also discuss how to gain some of the time back by being smarter about how to manage packages and even where the responsibility for managing the security of packages should be. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-367

MongoBleed and a recent OWASP CRS bypass show how parsing problems remain a source of security flaws regardless of programming language. We talk with Kalyani Pawar about how these problems rank against the Top 25 CWEs for 2025 and what it means for relying on LLMs to generate code. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-366