Application Security Weekly (Audio)

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!
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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