Open Source Security

Josh chats with Paul Asadoorian about a tool he wrote called fettle and a recent report Paul published on CVEs. Fettle is a tool to help update and manage Linux systems. The big sell on this one is checking if your firmware is out of date. We then talk about a report Paul created that doesn't obsess over CVEs, but rather the vendor updates. It makes more sense to worry about advisories as those are actionable, where CVEs often are not. It's a great chat and Paul is a legend in the industry.
The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at
https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-08-paul-fettle-cve

Josh chats with Erin Schnabel and Rob Nalen about a new effort from Commonhaus and HeroDevs for maintaining end of life open source. This project, the Open Source Sustainability Initiative is a clever way to bring corporations and projects together for maintenance of new and old versions of open source projects. This is pretty new territory for everyone, this project is worth keeping an eye on because it has a very small scope initially. Other similar ideas have gigantic scopes that are almost certainly too large.
The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at
https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-08-commonhaus-herodevs

Josh chats with James from e18e. This is a project that is working on improving Javascript packages by cleaning up, speeding up, and leveling up the dependencies. The way the e18e project handles this work is very human open source. It's all about building up connections and trust with the package communities, which is no small effort. James fills us in on what they're doing as well as how we can get involved. It's a truly amazing effort
The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at
https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-08-e18e-james

Josh chats with Patrick Garrity about the VulnCheck State of Exploitation 1H-2026 report. Patrick explains the current trends we are seeing around vulnerabilities right now. While the number of CVEs is way up, the number of actually exploited vulnerabilities isn't growing year over year. This tells us there is a lot of FUD and hype. We also ask where are all the vulnerabilities that project Glasswing found. They should be going public by now, but we're not seeing that play out in the data.
The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at
https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-08-vulncheck-state-of-exploitation

Open Source Security welcomes Josh Corman to talk about the challenges around securing our critical infrastructure. Specifically the discussion centers around our water supplies. There are a lot of really wild things happening right now with attacks like Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon. Josh has an amazing ability to make these sort of discussions easy to understand without spreading FUD. Josh also has suggestions for actions that need to be taken to help deal with these problems. It's not all technical solutions, there are non technical things we can do to help reduce the risk posed by our technical systems failing.
The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at
https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-07-critical-infrastructure-josh-corman