Security News

Prpl Foundation announced the release of its prplMesh software stack, eligible for Wi-Fi Alliance certification as Release 1, for both Agent and Controller. The prplMesh release includes open-source code for both Agent and Controller, providing a complete EasyMesh network.

Application security testing company GrammaTech announced on Wednesday that it has released an open source tool designed to detect API usage errors. The tool, named SWAP Detector, was developed as part of a research project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and GrammaTech says it can be highly useful for DevOps application security testing.

GrammaTech has released Swap Detector, an open source tool that enables developers and DevOps teams to identify errors due to swapped function arguments, which can also be present in deployed code. API usage errors are a common source of security and reliability vulnerabilities.

Adobe has made available in open source a tool designed to identify randomly generated strings in any plain text. Dubbed Stringlifier, the tool was written in Python and leverages machine learning to differentiate random character sequences from normal text sequences.

Accurics unveiled a major upgrade to Terrascan, the open source static code analyzer that enables developers to build secure infrastructure as code. The new Terrascan architecture leverages the Open Policy Agent engine from CNCF, which dramatically simplifies policy definition for developers that want to create custom policies as well as provides over 500 out-of-the-box policies for the CIS Benchmark.

Intel, SAP, and Citrix release critical security updatesAugust 2020 Patch Tuesday was expectedly observed by Microsoft and Adobe, but many other software firms decided to push out security updates as well. Exploits for vBulletin zero-day released, attacks are ongoingThe fix for CVE-2019-16759, a remote code execution vulnerability in vBulletin that was patched in September 2019, is incomplete, security researcher Amir Etemadieh has discovered.

There has been a massive 430% surge in next generation cyber attacks aimed at actively infiltrating open source software supply chains, Sonatype has found. The difference between "Next generation" and "Legacy" software supply chain attacks is simple but important: next generation attacks like ​Octopus Scanner​ and ​electron-native-notify​ are strategic and involve bad actors intentionally targeting and surreptitiously compromising "Upstream" open source projects so they can subsequently exploit vulnerabilities when they inevitably flow "Downstream" into the wild.

Facebook has announced the availability of Pysa, an open-source tool designed for the static analysis of Python code. The security-focused tool relies on Pyre, Facebook's type checker for Python, and allows for the analysis of how data flows through code.

Troy Hunt, the security expert who handles the breach notification website Have I Been Pwned, announced late last week that he is ready to make the code behind the site available in open source. Hunt now says that the time has come for the project to evolve into open source, especially given the fact that community contributions to Have I Been Pwned have increased significantly recently.

Need a tool to check your Python-based applications for security issues? Facebook has open-sourced Pysa, a tool that looks at how data flows through the code and helps developers prevent data flowing into places it shouldn't. "Pysa tracks flows of data through a program. The user defines sources as well as sinks," Facebook security engineer Graham Bleaney and software engineer Sinan Cepel explained.