Blogmarks tagged opensource, security
Filters: Type: blogmark × opensource × security × Sorted by date
Bullying in Open Source Software Is a Massive Security Vulnerability. The Xz story from last month, where a malicious contributor almost managed to ship a backdoor to a number of major Linux distributions, included a nasty detail where presumed collaborators with the attacker bullied the maintainer to make them more susceptible to accepting help.
Hans-Christoph Steiner from F-Droid reported a similar attempt from a few years ago:
A new contributor submitted a merge request to improve the search, which was oft requested but the maintainers hadn't found time to work on. There was also pressure from other random accounts to merge it. In the end, it became clear that it added a SQL injection vulnerability.
404 Media's Jason Koebler ties the two together here and makes the case for bullying as a genuine form of security exploit in the open source ecosystem. # 9th May 2024, 10:26 pm
gchq.github.io/CyberChef (via) CyberChef is “the Cyber Swiss Army Knife—a web app for encryption, encoding, compression and data analysis”—entirely client-side JavaScript with dozens of useful tools for working with different formats and encodings.
It’s maintained and released by GCHQ—the UK government’s signals intelligence security agency.
I didn’t know GCHQ had a presence on GitHub, and I find the URL to this tool absolutely delightful. They first released it back in 2016 and it has over 3,700 commits.
The top maintainers also have suitably anonymous usernames—great work, n1474335, j433866, d98762625 and n1073645. # 26th March 2024, 5:08 pm
datasette on Open Source Insights (via) Open Source Insights is "an experimental service developed and hosted by Google to help developers better understand the structure, security, and construction of open source software packages". It calculates scores for packages using various automated heuristics. A JSON version of the resulting score card can be accessed using https://deps.dev/_/s/pypi/p/{package_name}/v/ # 11th August 2022, 1:06 am
Microsoft® Open Source Software (OSS) Secure Supply Chain (SSC) Framework Simplified Requirements. This is really good: don’t get distracted by the acronyms, skip past the intro and head straight to the framework practices section, which talks about things like keeping copies of the packages you depend on, running scanners, tracking package updates and most importantly keeping an inventory of the open source packages you work so you can quickly respond to things like log4j.
I feel like I say this a lot these days, but if you had told teenage-me that Microsoft would be publishing genuinely useful non-FUD guides to open source supply chain security by 2022 I don’t think I would have believed you. # 6th August 2022, 4:49 pm
Reducing XSS by way of Automatic Context-Aware Escaping in Template Systems (via) The Google Online Security Blog reminds us that simply HTML-escaping everything isn’t enough—the type of escaping needed depends on the current markup context, for example variables inside JavaScript blocks should be escaped differently. Google’s open source Ctemplate library uses an HTML parser to keep track of the current context and apply the correct escaping function automatically. # 14th April 2009, 9:26 am
Ruby’s Vulnerability Handling Debacle. The critical Ruby vulnerabilities are over a week old now but there’s still no good official patch (the security patches cause segfaults in Rails, leaving the community reliant on unofficial patches from third parties). Max Caceres has three takeaway lessons, the most important of which is to always keep a “last-known-good” branch to apply critical patches to. # 2nd July 2008, 10:39 am
DHS Funding Open Source Security. Paying for “source code analysis technology” coverage of Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL and more. # 17th January 2006, 10:18 pm