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Open Source Security

Josh Bressers

Open Source Security is a media project to help showcase and educate on open source security. Our goal is to give the community a platform educate both developers and users on how open source security works.

There's a lot of good work happening that doesn't get attention because there's no marketing department behind it, they don't have a developer relations team posting on LinkedIn every two hours. Let's focus on those people and teams then learn what they do and how they do it. The goal is to hear from the people doing the work, they know what's up, they have a lot to teach us. We just have to listen.

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  • 22 episodes
  • weekly
  • Avg 36 min
  • English

Episodes 22

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  • Monday · 38 min

    CVEs vs Advisories with Paul Asadoorian

    Josh chats with Paul Asadoorian about a tool he wrote called fettle and a recent report Paul published on CVEs. Fettle is a tool to help update and manage Linux systems. The big sell on this one is checking if your firmware is out of date. We then talk about a report Paul created that doesn't obsess over CVEs, but rather the vendor updates. It makes more sense to worry about advisories as those are actionable, where CVEs often are not. It's a great chat and Paul is a legend in the industry. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-08-paul-fettle-cve

  • August 17 · 34 min

    Maintaining EOL Open Source with Commonhaus and HeroDevs

    Josh chats with Erin Schnabel and Rob Nalen about a new effort from Commonhaus and HeroDevs for maintaining end of life open source. This project, the Open Source Sustainability Initiative is a clever way to bring corporations and projects together for maintenance of new and old versions of open source projects. This is pretty new territory for everyone, this project is worth keeping an eye on because it has a very small scope initially. Other similar ideas have gigantic scopes that are almost certainly too large. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-08-commonhaus-herodevs

  • August 10 · 35 min

    Cleanup, Speedup, Levelup open source at e18e

    Josh chats with James from e18e. This is a project that is working on improving Javascript packages by cleaning up, speeding up, and leveling up the dependencies. The way the e18e project handles this work is very human open source. It's all about building up connections and trust with the package communities, which is no small effort. James fills us in on what they're doing as well as how we can get involved. It's a truly amazing effort The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-08-e18e-james

  • August 3 · 36 min

    VulnCheck's State of Exploitation Report with Patrick Garrity

    Josh chats with Patrick Garrity about the VulnCheck State of Exploitation 1H-2026 report. Patrick explains the current trends we are seeing around vulnerabilities right now. While the number of CVEs is way up, the number of actually exploited vulnerabilities isn't growing year over year. This tells us there is a lot of FUD and hype. We also ask where are all the vulnerabilities that project Glasswing found. They should be going public by now, but we're not seeing that play out in the data. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-08-vulncheck-state-of-exploitation

  • July 27 · 35 min

    Securing critical infrastructure with Josh Corman

    Open Source Security welcomes Josh Corman to talk about the challenges around securing our critical infrastructure. Specifically the discussion centers around our water supplies. There are a lot of really wild things happening right now with attacks like Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon. Josh has an amazing ability to make these sort of discussions easy to understand without spreading FUD. Josh also has suggestions for actions that need to be taken to help deal with these problems. It's not all technical solutions, there are non technical things we can do to help reduce the risk posed by our technical systems failing. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-07-critical-infrastructure-josh-corman

  • July 20 · 34 min

    Abandoned open source with Josh Marpet

    Josh welcomes Josh Marpet for a discussion about abandoned open source packages. Josh Marpet has a foundation called Value Chain Risk Institute that has a report discussion how to start measuring if an open source package might be abandoned. There's a lot of data, but not a lot of groups using that data to help make informed decisions about using open source. VCRI is one of those places that's starting to do this. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-07-VCRI-josh-marpet

  • July 13 · 32 min

    Red Hat's Project Lightwell with Mo Duffy

    Josh welcomes Mo Duffy from Red Hat to chat about project Lightwell. The idea is to leverage the resources and understanding Red Hat has built up over the years to help deal with the deluge of vulnerability reports that are overwhelming open source projects. Mo does a really good job of explaining why this is fundamentally a people problem, not a technology problem. But it's a people problem we can probably use technology to help. It will be interesting to see where Lightwell goes in the next few years. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-07-lightwell-mo-duffy

  • July 6 · 32 min

    Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund with Lori and Niko

    Josh chats with Lori Lorusso and Niko Matsakis about the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund. This is a new project the Rust Foundation has create to help fund Rust maintainers. It's a great discussion where Lori and Niko cover all the ways they expect to fund the maintainers which is never as easy as one initially expects. Funding open source is a huge topic right now, it sounds like the Rust Foundation has some great ideas. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-07-rfmf-lori-niko

  • June 29 · 34 min

    AIBOM, CBOM, and HBOM with Allan Friedman

    Josh chats with Allan Friedman about all things Bill of Materials. Allan did a ton of work to help turn SBOM into what it is today. He has many thoughts and ideas around the new types of BOMs, a concept he's calling the OmniBOM. Allan is always fun to chat with and he brings a ton of knowledge and advice. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-06-allan-omnibom

  • June 22 · 34 min

    Packagist and Composer security with Jordi Boggiano

    Josh welcomes Jordi Boggiano the lead maintainer of Composer and Packagist to explain the truckload of security features they've recently added. Packagist is the PHP package registry, Composer is the dependency manager for PHP. Recently the people behind these projects have added a number of security features that will improve the security of the entire ecosystem. Jordi explains it all to us and gives a glimpse of what's coming next. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-06-packagist-security-jordi

  • June 15 · 36 min

    Sustaining Open VSX with Mike and Thabang

    Josh welcomes Mike Milinkovich and Thabang Mashologu from the Eclipse Foundation to talk about their new managed Open VSX registry. This is the first open source package registry to create a commercial operation for large company users to help fund the registry. We discuss how we got here, what's actually going on, and why this commercial approach is working. Everyone knew this day would come, and it looks like the Eclipse Foundation got this one right. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-06-openvsx-mike-thabang/

  • June 8 · 35 min

    Hacking your CI/CD with François Proulx

    Josh welcomes back François Proulx to talk about the absolute madness in the CI/CD universe right now. We also learn about François' new project SmokedMeat which is a tool to help you hack your own CI/CD. When Josh spoke to François a year ago, the world was a very different place than it is today. François has a ton of knowledge about how we got here and what we can do moving forward. Boost Security has a bunch of amazing open source tools François built that can help keep CI/CD systems understood and locked down. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-06-françois-smoked-meat/

  • June 1 · 31 min

    Open source verification with Sal Kimmich

    Josh chats with Sal Kimmich about the current state of everything, and what we can expect next. Sal has some incredible insight into what we can expect to see due to the current wave of security bugs and incidents. There are some new features we will need in both our hardware and software to ward off the state of things. Since those features are years away, what we need in the short term is shoring up our SDLC programs. Sal has some really good medical examples and analogies for this one. It's a huge problem but not insurmountable. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-06-verification-sal-kimmich/

  • May 25 · 37 min

    Vulnerability disclosure with Casey Ellis

    Josh talks to Casey Ellis about why vulnerability disclosure is so hard, and also so important. Casey is one of the best in this space having been a Bugcrowd founder. There are few people with more experience and insight into how a security vulnerability should be handled, and why the explosion of AI is making all this much harder than it's ever been before. While finding vulnerabilities is easy, reporting them is still a lot of work. Casey is working on helping everyone better understand all this with his disclose.io project. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-05-vulnerability-disclosure-casey-ellis/

  • May 18 · 36 min

    F-Droid the open app store with Hans

    Josh talks to Hans-Christoph Steiner about F-Droid, the Free and Open Source Android App Repository. The way F-Droid works looks a lot like a Linux distribution which has some interesting security challenges, but also some great security benefits. Hans walks us through the current state of open app repositories and also what the future currently looks like. There are more open phones than ever before, but there are also more challenges than ever before. Hans breaks it all down in an easy to understand way. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-05-fdroid-hans-steiner/

  • May 11 · 38 min

    Open source is critical infrastructure with Kat Cosgrove

    Josh talks to Kat Cosgrove about a how companies should be treating open source more like their critical infrastructure than free stuff. Kat has a ton of knowledge about how the interactions between companies and open source communities can work well, or not work at all. Kat's time on the Kubernetes Release Team. We touch on how a project like Kubernetes is super successful, while another, Ingress NGINX, was not. It's a super insightful discussion with a ton of lessons and advice for everyone. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-05-open-source-infrastructure-kat/

  • May 4 · 34 min

    How to actually test a disaster plan with David Bernstein

    Josh and David finish up the disaster recovery and emergency planning trilogy. In this one David tells us how to test the plan he told us how to build in the last episode. There are some great ideas in this one about how to test the process not the people. How to construct the plan, and even some tips to go from a plan to some actual real world testing. It's another episode filled with great and practical advice. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-05-testing-the-plan-david-bernstein/

  • April 27 · 34 min

    Open Source Pledge with Vlad-Stefan Harbuz

    Josh has a discussion with Vlad-Stefan Harbuz about the Open Source Pledge as well as his recent FOSDEM talk. The Open Source Pledge is all about trying to build a sustainable universe for open source maintainers. This ties into Vlad's FOSDEM talk which was all about the challenge of just knowing what open source you are using. The importance of trying to make open source sustainable is a really important topic, but it's also a really hard topic. Vlad helps explain all of this as well as some ideas for the solving this in the future. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-04-open-source-pledge-vlad/

  • April 20 · 39 min

    Building a plan for disaster with David Bernstein

    Josh welcomes back David Bernstein to talk about creating a disaster recover plan. It's a very timely topic given all the current events. There are more supply chain attacks and compromises than ever before. There are some great resources for this planning, but as David tells us, it's really not that hard to put some plans together. It's easy to over-plan, David gives some great tips on getting started with our planning for an eventual incident. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-04-disaster-planning-david-bernstein/

  • April 13 · 38 min

    Open Source Malware with Paul McCarty

    Josh talks to Paul McCarty of Open Source Malware about ... open source malware. Paul explains why there aren't many good open source malware datasets. We discuss why the existing data is lacking for many use cases. We of course touch on AI and the malware in skills problems and challenges. It's a fun discussion with a lot of new and interesting problems we all have to deal with. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-04-open-source-malware-paul-mccarty/

Showing 1–20 of 22 episodes