Open Source Security

Josh talks to Michael Winser about a talk he gave at FOSDEM as well as his work on Alpha Omega at the Linux Foundation. Michael is approaching open source security in a way that nobody has ever tried before. What if we could fund some really big, really hard projects? It's not cheap or easy, but he's getting it done. We spend a lot of the time discussing package registries, which are a huge topic. Michael is doing some amazing work helping package registries which is the first step in a very long journey.
The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at
https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-03-michael-winser/

Josh chats with Brian Fox from Sonatype about their 2026 State of the Software Supply Chain report. Most of the number continue to grow at alarming rates, but there's some new interesting findings in this one. We discuss end of life and open source which is tough to define. We touch on what using AI with open source dependencies looks like (and why it's broken), and we discuss the challenge of upgrading your open source dependencies in a way that doesn't break everything. It's a great report and great discussion.
The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at
https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-03-SOTSSC-Brian-Fox/

Josh talks to Luke Hinds, CEO of Always Further, about MCP and agent security. We start out talking about Luke's new tool, nono which is a sandboxing tool that has AI agents in mind as a use case. We explain what MCP and agents are doing as well as why it's so hard to secure them. It's not impossible, but it's not simple either. We end the show by discussing some of the more human aspects to security and how history may be repeating itself with security folks laughing at new users who don't know any better.
The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at
https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-03-mcp-agent-luke/

Josh talks to Paul Kehrer and Alex Gaynor, from the Python Cryptographic Authority. Alex and Paul recently published a statement discuss the challenges posed by modern OpenSSL. We discuss the statement and their relationship with OpenSSL. We chat about some of the current features in cryptography, as well as some of what's coming in the future. It's a fun conversation that hits on a lot of great points.
The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at
https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-03-cryptography-alex-paul/

Josh talks to Sylvestre Ledru about the Rust coreutils project. We've been using GNU coreutils for decades now, and the goal of Rust coreutils is to rewrite these utilities in Rust. The primary reason isn't security, it's to modernize the code and attract new contributors. Sylvestre discusses with quite pleasant relationship with the GNU coreutils developers, some of the challenges in the project. What Ubuntu using this by default meant, and also gives us some things to watch for in the future. It's a super fun discussion about why Rust is not only awesome, but also the future.
The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at
https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-03-rust-coreutils-sylvestre-ledru/