Ted Harrington –

Executive Partner at Independent Security Evaluators

Ted Harrington is the #1 best selling author of HACKABLE: How to Do Application Security Right, and the Executive Partner at Independent Security Evaluators (ISE), the company of ethical hackers famous for hacking cars, medical devices, web applications, and password managers. He’s helped hundreds of companies fix tens of thousands of security vulnerabilities, including Google, Amazon, and Netflix. Ted has been featured in more than 100 media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Forbes. His team founded and organizes IoT Village, an event whose hacking contest is a three-time DEF CON Black Badge winner.

John Kinsella –

Chief Architect at Accurics

Matt Alderman –

Executive Director at CyberRisk Alliance

Mike Shema –

Product Security Lead at Square

John Kinsella –

Chief Architect at Accurics

Matt Alderman –

Executive Director at CyberRisk Alliance

Mike Shema –

Product Security Lead at Square

1. An Exploration of JSON Interoperability Vulnerabilities – A good look into the differences between the standard for a format and the variations in how it’s implemented. Think of quirks as an elementary particle of security that combine to form flaws and vulns.

   Then check out this other article about “JSON With Commas and Comments” to see some other ways JSON has been extended. And, importantly, the point it makes about the relative success of readable vs. unreadable code. https://nigeltao.github.io/blog/2021/json-with-commas-comments.html

2. Engineering Practices Can Overcome DevOps Challenges – Even if DevOps is striving for automation, you can’t neglect the practices that are trying to make it more human than human.
3. Announcing the First-Ever Veracode Hacker Games – Hands-on exercises will always be a better path to understanding appsec than memorizing top 10 lists. Veracode wades into this arena with resources for new appsec practitioners. You can also check out their “forever free” community edition at https://info.veracode.com/security-labs-community-edition-signup.html
4. Developer Velocity at work: Key lessons from industry digital leaders – More examples, some familiar, of what it takes to make security a successful part of software development. And some important lessons for Security teams to understand what it takes to make their products and services successful for their consumers — especially for internal Security teams whose consumers are the company’s own development teams.
5. The little bug that couldn’t: Securing OpenSSL – You don’t need to dive into the C code internals of OpenSSL to appreciate how this article presents both a developer and researcher perspective on analyzing a bug, and the the specific technical details aren’t as important as the concept of variant analysis and using tools to help answer the question, “Where else is this bug in our code?”

   Microsoft took a slightly different approach in sharing CodeQL queries related to the Solarigate campaign. The premise is similar though, “Where else does this type of compromise appear?” Find more details in their article at https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2021/02/25/microsoft-open-sources-codeql-queries-used-to-hunt-for-solorigate-activity/ and the backdoor detections they created at https://github.com/github/codeql/pull/5083

6. OWASP’s 20th Anniversary Celebration – The CFP opens soon for OWASP’s 20th anniversary celebration in September. There’s a lot of appsec from 20 years ago that looks familiar to today. What could appsec do to make the next 20 years more successful?