Inside the OWASP Agent Security Regression Harness Project - Mert Satilmaz - ASW #393
Application Security Weekly (Audio)
Release Date: 07/28/2026
Application Security Weekly (Audio)
The OWAS Mobile Application Security (MAS) project recently released an updated version of its guidance, with excellent advice organized into common weaknesses, a verification standard for devs (MASVS), and a testing guide (MASTG). Ryan Lloyd and Jan Seredynski from Guardsquare dive into the project to talk about how it's been updated, how orgs can use it, and the challenges orgs face in managing their mobile frameworks and environments. We also cover how agents and LLMs are impacting mobile security and what future iterations of the MAS project might include for securing mobile apps...
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Finding flaws with LLMs and agents is changing bug bounty programs. But it's not necessarily changing how orgs fix those flaws. Shlomie Liberow shares his experience across a decade of bounty programs and how they have changed for researchers and orgs. He explains why fixing the bug reported through a bug bounty is more about understanding interconnected systems than fixing a single piece of software. We discuss how orgs can be more effective at securing their environment and what role LLMs might have in evaluating controls. Plus, we look to the future of bug bounty programs and how...
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While agents and LLMs haven't fundamentally changed core mobile vulnerability types, they have supercharged speed, scale, and accessibility—democratizing threats like automated phishing, synthetic identity fraud, and easier identification of hard-coded secrets. Ryan Lloyd and Jason Cortlund break down how threat actors leverage LLMs as a force multiplier to accelerate mobile app attacks. Then we discuss actionable defense strategies, from viewing agents as an active adversary to leveraging server-side threat telemetry, attestation, and layered defense strategies combined with polymorphic...
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AppSec has always emphasized techniques and tools for discovering vulns, along with taxonomies and lists for describing them. But just piling up more CVEs into a prioritized patching queue has never been an effective strategy. Nidhi Aggarwal talks about some of the economics and decisions that orgs evaluate when figuring out how to improve and protect their software. LLMs might be effective assistants in generating code, but only when they have the context of secure patterns to follow. We also talk about what some of the bug bounty data reveals in terms of successful researchers finding more...
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Sandboxing, least privilege, and monitoring are well-established controls in terms of the defenses they provide against unexpected and unauthorized actions. But being well-established in theory doesn't always translate to successful in practice. Kieran Human talks about some of the properties that a good sandbox should have and how monitoring creates a feedback loop to refine allow lists and access controls. In practice, the potential unpredictable behavior of an agent isn't much different from malware. We talk through some of the ways orgs can securely deploy agents without unnecessarily...
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info_outlineOrgs 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