The Open Source Initiative has published (news article here ) its definition of “open source AI,” and it’s terrible. It allows for secret training data and mechanisms. It allows for development to be done in secret. Since for a neural network, the training data is the source code—it …

Enlarge (credit: BeeBright / Getty Images / iStockphoto ) Researchers have determined that two fake AWS packages downloaded hundreds of times from the open source NPM JavaScript repository contained carefully concealed code that backdoored developers' computers when executed. The packages— img-aws-s3-object-multipart-copy and legacyaws-s3-object-multipart-copy —were attempts to appear as aws-s3-object-multipart-copy, a legitimate JavaScript …

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson) Vulnerabilities that went undetected for a decade left thousands of macOS and iOS apps susceptible to supply-chain attacks. Hackers could have added malicious code compromising the security of millions or billions of people who installed them, researchers said Monday. The vulnerabilities, which were fixed last …

Interesting social-engineering attack vector : McAfee released a report on a new LUA malware loader distributed through what appeared to be a legitimate Microsoft GitHub repository for the “C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS,” known as vcpkg. The attacker is exploiting a property of GitHub: comments to a …

After the XZ Utils discovery, people have been examining other open-source projects. Surprising no one, the incident is not unique: The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails. These emails implored OpenJS to take action …

Last week, the internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the attack and its discovery …

The cybersecurity world got really lucky last week. An intentionally placed backdoor in xz Utils, an open-source compression utility, was pretty much accidentally discovered by a Microsoft engineer—weeks before it would have been incorporated into both Debian and Red Hat Linux. From ArsTehnica : Malicious code added to xz …

Enlarge / Supply-chain attacks, like the latest PyPI discovery, insert malicious code into seemingly functional software packages used by developers. They're becoming increasingly common. (credit: Getty Images) PyPI, a vital repository for open source developers, temporarily halted new project creation and new user registration following an onslaught of package uploads …

Open-source software is used throughout the technology industry to help developers build software tools, apps, and services. While developers building with open-source software can (and often do) benefit greatly from the work of others, they should also conduct appropriate due diligence to protect against software supply chain attacks. With …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) A core developer of Nginx, currently the world's most popular web server, has quit the project, stating that he no longer sees it as "a free and open source project... for the public good." His fork, freenginx, is "going to be run by developers, and …

Cedar is an open-source language that you can use to write policies and make authorization decisions based on those policies. AWS security services including AWS Verified Access and Amazon Verified Permissions use Cedar to define policies. Cedar supports schema declaration for the structure of entity types in those policies …

They’re short unique strings : Sqids (pronounced “squids”) is an open-source library that lets you generate YouTube-looking IDs from numbers. These IDs are short, can be generated from a custom alphabet and are guaranteed to be collision-free. I haven’t dug into the details enough to know how they …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Highly invasive malware targeting software developers is once again circulating in Trojanized code libraries, with the latest ones downloaded thousands of times in the last eight months, researchers said Wednesday. Since January, eight separate developer tools have contained hidden payloads with various nefarious capabilities, security …

AWS Cryptography is pleased to announce that today, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) awarded AWS-LC its validation certificate as a Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-3, level 1, cryptographic module. This important milestone enables AWS customers that require FIPS-validated cryptography to leverage AWS-LC as a fully …

Google removed fake Signal and Telegram apps from its Play store. An app with the name Signal Plus Messenger was available on Play for nine months and had been downloaded from Play roughly 100 times before Google took it down last April after being tipped off by security firm …

This post is a deep dive into the design of Cedar, an open source language for writing and evaluating authorization policies. Using Cedar, you can control access to your application’s resources in a modular and reusable way. You write Cedar policies that express your application’s permissions, and …

In February, Meta released its large language model: LLaMA. Unlike OpenAI and its ChatGPT, Meta didn’t just give the world a chat window to play with. Instead, it released the code into the open-source community, and shortly thereafter the model itself was leaked. Researchers and programmers immediately started …

Given the pace of Amazon Web Services (AWS) innovation, it can be challenging to stay up to date on the latest AWS service and feature launches. AWS provides services and tools to help you protect your data, accounts, and workloads from unauthorized access. AWS data protection services provide encryption …

How will your organization manage this year's data growth and business requirements? Your actions and strategies involving data and AI will improve or undermine your organization's competitiveness in the months and years to come. Our teams at Google Cloud have an eye on the future as we evolve our …

BigQuery is a leading data warehouse solution in the market today, and is valued by customers who need to gather insights and advanced analytics on their data. Many common BigQuery use cases involve the storage and processing of Personal Identifiable Information (PII)—data that needs to be protected within …

Good essay arguing that open-source software is a critical national-security asset and needs to be treated as such: Open source is at least as important to the economy, public services, and national security as proprietary code, but it lacks the same standards and safeguards. It bears the qualities of …

This is a big deal : A developer has been caught adding malicious code to a popular open-source package that wiped files on computers located in Russia and Belarus as part of a protest that has enraged many users and raised concerns about the safety of free and open source …

The Open Source Security Foundation announced $10 million in funding from a pool of tech and financial companies, including $5 million from Microsoft and Google, to find vulnerabilities in open source projects: The “Alpha” side will emphasize vulnerability testing by hand in the most popular open-source projects, developing close …

January 7, 2022: The blog post has been updated to include using Network ACL rules to block potential log4j-related outbound traffic. January 4, 2022: The blog post has been updated to suggest using WAF rules when correct HTTP Host Header FQDN value is not provided in the request. December …

Overview In this post we will provide guidance to help customers who are responding to the recently disclosed log4j vulnerability. This covers what you can do to limit the risk of the vulnerability, how you can try to identify if you are susceptible to the issue, and then what …