AI-Era AppSec: Transparency, Trust, and Risk Beyond the Firewall - Felipe Zipitria, Steve Springett, Aruneesh Salhotra, Ken Huang - ASW #363
Application Security Weekly (Audio)
Release Date: 12/30/2025
Application Security Weekly (Audio)
Finding flaws has always been a focus of appsec. And now with open source projects and open weight models orgs have modern tools to review code and conduct pentests. Rishi Sharma describes the motivation behind creating a platform of LLM-driven security tools and the effective ways to keep the tools in scope, on budget, and for engineering teams. We talk about how prompts influence LLM activity, as well as the external constraints to keep the LLMs on task. And even if finding flaws is a major focus of appsec, its goal should be delivering secure software and systems. We touch on some of the...
info_outlineApplication 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...
info_outlineApplication Security Weekly (Audio)
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...
info_outlineApplication Security Weekly (Audio)
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...
info_outlineApplication Security Weekly (Audio)
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...
info_outlineApplication Security Weekly (Audio)
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: This segment is sponsored by Guardsquare. Visit to...
info_outlineApplication Security Weekly (Audio)
SquidBleed reveals another vuln that's been lurking for decades, but its real lesson is in managing an attack surface. Regardless of whatever programming language you use, removing code is one of the best security steps you can take, followed by changing default configs to turn off uncommon features and ancient protocols. The Linux kernel's removal of strncpy is another example of managing attack surface by replacing a notoriously misused and ambiguous function with more specific versions that better match the developers intent. It was a six-year journey for the kernel, but one that should...
info_outlineApplication Security Weekly (Audio)
Appsec has seen machine identities from daemons and processes to services, microservices, and cloud accounts. And now we have agents. Ev Kontsevoy talks about what it means to have engineers and agents interacting in an environment, and why a focus on actions can be more effective than roles. One of the biggest challenges in securing agents along with all of the other identities that organizations manage is how fragmented that management has become. But a unified engineering view of identities is just a start. Once you're able to shift to a practice where access is granted based on attributes...
info_outlineApplication Security Weekly (Audio)
Agents and LLMs are creating and reviewing code. They're a new tool to help developers write software and they're a new abstraction layer for expressing what code should do. But if we're focused on determining whether code is secure, where do we focus our attention on ensuring a secure outcome? Matias Madou talks about the challenges of finding metrics to help answer these questions. We walk through many of the questions we'd like to see answered and our desire to see appsec (finally?) shift out of a find-and-fix mode into a future of secure design. Visit for all the latest episodes! Show...
info_outlineApplication Security Weekly (Audio)
Most AppSec teams are working through more findings than their teams can validate. SAST surfaces thousands of potential issues. DAST generates alert volume that outpaces triage capacity. Somewhere in that output are the vulnerabilities that matter, the ones that are actually exploitable in production. This conversation explores why automated testing often stops short of the hardest part of the job: proving what is real. We dig into how business logic flaws and authorization vulnerabilities get missed by tools that scan without reasoning, what exploit validation looks like at runtime, and how...
info_outlineIn an era dominated by AI-powered security tools and cloud-native architectures, are traditional Web Application Firewalls still relevant? Join us as we speak with Felipe Zipitria, co-leader of the OWASP Core Rule Set (CRS) project. Felipe has been at the forefront of open-source security, leading the development of one of the world's most widely deployed WAF rule sets, trusted by organizations globally to protect their web applications.
Felipe explains why WAFs remain a critical layer in modern defense-in-depth strategies. We'll explore what makes OWASP CRS the go-to choice for security teams, dive into the project's current innovations, and discuss how traditional rule-based security is evolving to work alongside — not against — AI.
Segment Resources:
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github.com/coreruleset/coreruleset
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coreruleset.org
The future of CycloneDX is defined by modularity, API-first design, and deeper contextual insight, enabling transparency that is not just comprehensive, but actionable. At its heart is the Transparency Exchange API, which delivers a normalized, format-agnostic model for sharing SBOMs, attestations, risks, and more across the software supply chain.
As genAI transforms every sector of modern business, the security community faces a question: how do we protect systems we can't fully see or understand? In this fireside chat, Aruneesh Salhotra, Project Lead for OWASP AIBOM and Co-Lead of OWASP AI Exchange, discusses two groundbreaking initiatives that are reshaping how organizations approach AI security and supply chain transparency.
OWASP AI Exchange has emerged as the go-to single resource for AI security and privacy, providing over 200 pages of practical advice on protecting AI and data-centric systems from threats. Through its official liaison partnership with CEN/CENELEC, the project has contributed 70 pages to ISO/IEC 27090 and 40 pages to the EU AI Act security standard OWASP, achieving OWASP Flagship project status in March 2025.
Meanwhile, the OWASP AIBOM Project is establishing a comprehensive framework to provide transparency into how AI models are built, trained, and deployed, extending OWASP's mission of making security visible to the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem.
This conversation explores how these complementary initiatives are addressing real-world challenges—from prompt injection and data poisoning to model provenance and supply chain risks—while actively shaping international standards and regulatory frameworks. We'll discuss concrete achievements, lessons learned from global collaboration, and the ambitious roadmap ahead as these projects continue to mature and expand their impact across the AI security landscape.
Segment Resources:
Agentic AI introduces unique and complex security challenges that render traditional risk management frameworks insufficient. In this keynote, Ken Huang, CEO of Distributedapps.ai and a key contributor to AI security standards, outlines a new approach to manage these emerging threats. The session will present a practical strategy that integrates the NIST AI Risk Management Framework with specialized tools to address the full lifecycle of Agentic AI.
Segment Resources:
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aivss.owasp.org
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https://kenhuangus.substack.com/p/owasp-aivss-the-new-framework-for
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https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/blog/2025/02/06/agentic-ai-threat-modeling-framework-maestro
This interview is sponsored by the OWASP GenAI Security Project. Visit https://securityweekly.com/owaspappsec to watch all of CyberRisk TV's interviews from the OWASP 2025 Global AppSec Conference!
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Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-363