Minimum Safe Distance - ASW #148

We start with the article about "Researchers Secretly Tried To Add Vulnerabilities to Linux Kernel, Ended Up Getting Banned" and explore its range of issues from ethics to securing huge, distributed software projects. It's hardly novel to point out that bad actors can attempt to introduce subtle and exploitable bugs. More generally, we've also seen impacts from package owners who have revoked their code, like NPM leftpad, or who transfer ownership to actors who later on abuse the package's reputation, as we've seen in Chrome Plugins. So, what could have been a better research focus? In the era of more pervasive fuzzing, how much should we continue to rely on people for security code review? This week in the AppSec News: Signal points out parsing problems, privacy preserving improvements to AirDrop, Homebrew disclosure, WhatsApp workflows, adversarial data ordering for ML, & more!

Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw148

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Read the research paper at https://github.com/QiushiWu/QiushiWu.github.io/blob/main/papers/OpenSourceInsecurity.pdf

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