Application Security Weekly (Audio)

There's already an increase in volume of security flaws found by LLMs. And orgs are already turning to LLMs to write code. So, what happens when orgs lean on LLMs to create patches for those security flaws? Keith Hoodlet gives an exclusive early look at his team's recent research into the success, quality, and failures of LLM-generated security patches. Notably, they saw scenarios across a spectrum from robust, effective patches to patches that changed the software's behavior to patches that introduced new vulns to patches that didn't even fix the original vuln while also introducing a new vuln.
The research considers factors like quality and correctness of prompts, complexity of the target software, programming language, and expertise required to understand what a robust patch should look like. If you're going to spend tokens on fixing security flaws, you want a feedback loop that fixes them correctly -- not an infinite loop of new flaws creeping in with every LLM iteration.
Watch for this research, its toolset, and data to be released on Thursday August 6th during Black Hat.
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Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-394

Orgs need to be able to use agents, MCPs, and LLMs in ways that don't lead to unexpected actions and undesirable outcomes. The OWASP Agent Security Regression Harness project is an approach for defining customizable scenarios and testing whether those systems fail against known security threats. Mert Saltimaz talks about the background of the project, how orgs can use it as they bring more LLMs into their environment, and how the project intends to grow. Importantly, we also talk about the security controls and designs that orgs can build around the systems and data that models interact with in addition to evaluating the security of the agents and agent harnesses themselves.
Segment Resources:
https://github.com/OWASP/Agent-Security-Regression-Harness
https://youtu.be/6DWs5EwbFQ0?si=r0IJ_F0SZnkPzzYg -- "What Trading Systems Taught Me About Breaking (And Defending) Infrastructure"
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Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-393

Appsec often frames usability and security as at odds with each other. Apple's software has famously emphasized the importance of usability while also creating a solid security foundation. Patrick Wardle talks about how he's seen malware shift from Windows to macOS, how Apple's aggressive stance on deprecation benefits security, and the areas of the OS where he still sees plenty of opportunity for more security research. We discuss how developers make defensible design choices, why privacy needs security, and some security principles that any app developer should keep in mind regardless of their programming language or operating system.
Resources:
https://objective-see.org/blog/blog_0x86.html
https://objective-see.org/products/lulu.html
https://objectivebythesea.org/v9/index.html
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Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-392

While LLMs and agents are new to appsec and everyone else, a lot of AI security requirements translate to well-known API security requirements. Jeremy Snyder helps us frame the OWASP LLM Top 10 into five layers in order to help orgs understand and prioritize their attack surface. A lot of orgs don't have to deal with model-specific threats or building their own GPU architecture, but every org adopting LLMs and agents should be aware of how those agents are being invoked and the output those agents are producing. That awareness of input and output helps in identifying and mitigating prompt injection attacks, ensuring agents are working within their expected boundaries, and taming token budgets.
Resources:
https://genai.owasp.org/llm-top-10/
https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/prompt-caching.html
https://www.firetail.ai/blog/beyond-the-spectacle-rsac-2026-and-the-5-layers-of-ai-security
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Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-391

Mobile applications have unique risks and threat models compared to server-side applications and infrastructure. Consequently, they need different strategies to ensure their business logic and workflows well secured. We'll dive into some of these defense-in-depth strategies and why they are important to mobile applications. Securing workflows goes beyond input validation and pattern matching suspicious payloads; it requires detailed attention to state machines, edge cases, and collecting signals to evaluate trust.
Segment Resources:
https://hubs.la/Q04jLKj70
https://mas.owasp.org/MASTG/0x04c-Tampering-and-Reverse-Engineering/
https://owasp.org/API-Security/editions/2023/en/0x00-header/
This segment is sponsored by Guardsquare. Visit https://securityweekly.com/guardsquare to learn more about them!
Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes!
Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-390