SOSS Fusion 2024

My presentation aims to explain the crucial roles of maintainers and contributors in securing open-source software. The primary objective is to highlight how effective collaboration between these roles ensures open-source projects' quality, usability, and sustainability. The ultimate goal is to empower newcomers and seasoned contributors to take active roles in maintaining and improving the sustainability of open-source software. Drawing from my experiences within various open-source communities, I will emphasize the profound impact of collaborative efforts on project success.

How end users can do a reasonable verification of the SLSA provenance produced by trusted build systems to protect against threats like build from modified source, compromised build process and downloading modified packages

Fuzz testing of compiled binary code is imperative when source code is not available. AFLplusplus is a popular fuzzer, responsible for discovering several vulnerabilities in open/closed source software. While fuzzing, AFLplusplus acquires code coverage feedback by emulating the target binary in QEMU usermode, thereby supporting architecture neutral fuzzing as well. There is however no native instruction hooking and memory control support in QEMU. Albeit, having such ability can greatly benefit binary fuzz testing by patching/fixing roadblock locations that lead to long-running fuzzing campaigns. The current solution is a pythonic wrapper, UNICORN, on QEMU that is understandably slow and, more importantly, requires significant configuration to avail features that are enabled by default in AFLplusplus's raw QEMU mode. In this lightning talk, we will touch upon the QEMU native hooking bridge [https://github.com/AFLplusplus/AFLplusplus/tree/stable/qemu_mode/hooking_bridge]. We will briefly go over its design and implementation. We will then describe its usage with one or more examples. Furthermore, we will demonstrate its superiority over AFLplusplus's UNICORN mode.

Vulnerabilities hidden within open source libs raises risk for containerized workloads. Runtime protection is needed, even for ephemeral applications, because automated attacks spread in seconds. Join SentinelOne as we demonstrate AI-powered threat protection and discuss its place in a CNAPP strategy. By combining agentless insights spanning asset discovery, CSPM, vulnerability management, and more, with the stopping power of a runtime agent, multi-cloud organizations are best equipped to accelerate and secure innovation at scale.

Diversity plays a pivotal role in enhancing the security of open-source software. By involving contributors from various backgrounds, infusing different cultures, educational paths, and professional experiences, the open-source community benefits from a broad spectrum of perspectives. This diversity leads to a more comprehensive identification of potential vulnerabilities, as contributors bring unique approaches to problem-solving and threat analysis. In this talk Rao Lakkakula and Tunji M Taiwo, go over how diversity fosters a more inclusive and collaborative environment, encouraging more individuals to participate and contribute. In essence, diversity in open-source software development is not just a matter of equity and representation; it is a critical factor in creating robust, secure, and resilient software systems while driving innovation and growth within the broader open-source ecosystem.

The GCC steering committee has accepted our project to add COBOL to GCC. This is our story of learning how to interact with a hoary, established project and (we hope) make a significant contribution.

Most of us trust Git’s security features—signed commits and tags, strict access controls, and robust verification processes—to protect our codebases, even if the Git host is compromised. We rely on practices like ensuring merge commits are signed by trusted authorities, requiring feature branch commits to come from a single user, and having multiple users with appropriate authority levels verify each merge.

But what if I told you that a malicious attacker could still introduce harmful code into a repository, manipulate signed tags, and roll back patches—all without breaking a single signature or triggering any alarms?

In this talk, we will demonstrate how easily an attacker can execute these malicious actions, bypassing all the supposed security measures. You’ll witness firsthand how undetectable these changes can be, highlighting a critical and often overlooked vulnerability in Git.

We will also introduce gittuf, an up-and-coming tool from the OpenSSF project that can mitigate these risks with a decentralized key management permission-based verification system.

OIDC, STS, Workload Identity, Identity Federation. These concepts are often pointed to as best practices for managing CI/CD and other machine identities. They allow you to reduce the risks of long lived credentials by moving to short lived, workload specific identities. But how do they work? In this talk, we'll do a deep dive into each of these topics and how they relate to each other. We'll walk through the practical steps of using identity federation in your own workloads - how tokens are constructed, how they are verified, how they can be exchanged to be compatible across different hosted services, and what policies you may want to enforce on identity federation to keep your resources secure. You'll come away from this talk with a deeper understanding of identity federation and how it works, and hopefully with some ideas for how you can use it in your own environments to improve your security!

This session will focus on the validation of kubernetes webhook controllers. Currently, testing of these types of controllers is largely the onus of the developers. While the standard unit and end-to-end tests may be sufficient for rolling out a product, the other half of the responsibility lays on the user to independently validate these controllers in their environment. The intent is to lay out a framework that supports how end-users may interrogate these controllers to validate their behaviors, particularly with respect to how that behavior satisfies various controls, e.g., regulated standards or best practices. Our framework looks at using an open source tool, Lula, to add cluster resources, measure the response of the controller, and output a validation of the controller's behavior. The result is a repeatable and scalable evaluation of webhook controllers. This evaluation becomes more critical as environments scale and more complex admission/mutation is introduced. These controllers are often performing critical security functions in the environment and should be continually monitored and evaluated for their efficacy, particularly as the system they exist in evolves.

The US Department of Defense, like many industrial, academic, and government institutions across the world, are intricately dependent on open source software and seek concrete means to objectively assess the trustworthiness of not only the products of the OSS ecosystem but also the processes enacted by projects to produce that software. One such DoD project, Unified Platform, is developing techniques to evaluate publicly available information from OSS projects to determine the risk levels associated with using the open source software, both now and in the future. Current efforts are concentrating on evaluating a project’s processes, policies, and practices. This includes leveraging tools such as MITRE’s Hipcheck, the Open Source Security Foundation’s Scorecard, and other sources to support Unified Platform's Software Approval Process and Software Supply Chain Practices. This presentation will cover how these techniques are providing the insight needed by this DoD project to address emerging DoD guidance in the use of open source software.

ClearlyDefined is a free service and open source project from the Open Source Initiative (OSI) that helps organizations ensure supply chain compliance and security. Generating SBOMs at scale for each stage on the supply chain, for every build or release, has proven to be a real challenge. And fixing the same missing or wrongly identified licensing metadata over and over again has been a redundant pain for everyone. This is where ClearlyDefined shines, as it makes it really easy for organizations to fetch a cached copy of licensing metadata for each component through a simple API and fix any issues, which is always up-to-date thanks to its crowdsourced database. In this session, we'll provide an introduction to ClearlyDefined and discuss the latest developments. We'll provide case studies of how organizations like GitHub, SAP, Microsoft, and Bloomberg are leveraging ClearlyDefined not only for their own needs internally, but for the benefit of all.

Software supply chain security is more important than ever. Yet maintaining secure container images is challenging, because patch options can be limited: wait impatiently for third-party image updates to be released, especially for images with multi-publisher dependencies, or perform your own full image rebuild, a time and resource-intensive process. Project Copacetic (Copa) reduces turnaround time and complexity for image patching. Copa integrates into existing build infrastructure, giving users greater control over their patching timeline while reducing costs. Using image scanners like Trivy, Copa generates a vulnerability report and identifies necessary OS-level package updates. Copa then updates your target image using Buildkit (Docker’s default builder) by creating a new patch layer on the original image. Copa can even patch distroless images. We’ll demo Copa, including how to integrate it into pipelines, extend its functionality with scanner formats, and exclude scanners to update all outdated packages. You’ll leave ready to keep your images secure. As a newly accepted CNCF sandbox project, Copa invites you to join the community and advance your software security!

Product recalls and Supply Chain Management have been used for decades with great success to help identify the source of unexpected hazards in products (from exploding batteries to spider attracting fuel lines) and protect consumers from these hazards. While developing software can be considerably different than developing and manufacturing physical products, there are lessons to be learned about the importance of properly identifying all the components that are included in a product. In this session, we will cover the importance of versioning both as a consumer and a producer of open source software and its impact on security.

Recently found SCARLETEEL, a new attack pattern starts from a compromised Kubernetes container and spreads to the victim’s AWS account. Luckily, we have OSS Falco and new plug-in approach can detect this kind of threat in cloud runtime!

In this age of open source in machine learning, ML practitioners increasingly rely on public model hubs for downloading foundation models to fine tune instead of creating models from scratch. However, compromised artifacts are very easy to share on these hubs. ML model files are vulnerable to Model Serialization Attacks (MSA), the injection of malicious code that will execute automatically when the file is deserialized. MSAs are the Trojan horses of ML, capable of turning a seemingly innocuous model into a backdoor to your system. So, what can you do about it? In this talk, we explore two strategies to use open-source tools to mitigate the risk of MSAs and other supply chain attacks on ML: model scanning with ModelScan by Protect AI and cryptographic signing with Sigstore by OpenSSF. Model scanning is our window into the black box model files. Cryptographic signatures link an artifact to a source’s identity, backed up by a trusted authority. Scanning and signing are both widely used defenses for traditional software artifacts, but they have not been widely adopted in AI yet. WWe will demonstrate how these tools can bridge the AI/ML security gap, and stop Trojan Horses at the gate.

While commercial supply chain attacks are becoming more manageable, security teams have a much harder time with open-source software supply chains. This session will provide an attacker's perspective of open-source flows and flaws and dive into several unique supply chain weaknesses. Demos will show the ease of conducting different attacks and provide a perspective on defeating them as defenders.

As software products and services increasingly rely on third-party or open-source components, ensuring the security and currency of these dependencies becomes paramount. Development teams must stay ahead of security issues, promptly update dependencies, and be alerted when new vulnerabilities arise. To save time and mitigate risk, it’s crucial to automate the process of updating dependencies with the latest functionality and security patches. Automated pull requests can streamline the process, allowing developers to focus on critical tasks while retaining control over the final merge and production rollout. But how do we achieve this? Enter Dependabot! In this session, Nilekh will demonstrate how to leverage Dependabot (and others like Renovate Bot) to automatically manage Docker image dependencies for Helm charts and native Kubernetes YAML resource files.