DEF CON 30 - Jonathan Leitschuh - Scaling the Security Researcher to Eliminate OSS Vulnerabilities

Hundreds of thousands of human hours are invested every year in finding common security vulnerabilities with relatively simple fixes. These vulnerabilities aren’t sexy, cool, or new, we’ve known about them for years, but they’re everywhere!

The scale of GitHub & tools like CodeQL (GitHub's code query language) enable one to scan for vulnerabilities across hundreds of thousands of OSS projects, but the challenge is how to scale the triaging, reporting, and fixing. Simply automating the creation of thousands of bug reports by itself isn’t useful, & would be even more of a burden on volunteer maintainers of OSS projects. Ideally the maintainers would be provided with not only information about the vulnerability, but also a fix in the form of an easily actionable pull request.

When facing a problem of this scale, what is the most efficient way to leverage researcher knowledge to fix the most vulnerabilities across OSS? This talk will cover a highly scalable solution - automated bulk pull request generation. We’ll discuss the practical applications of this technique on real world OSS projects. We’ll also cover technologies like CodeQL & OpenRewrite (a style-preserving refactoring tool created at Netflix & now developed by Moderne). Let’s not just talk about vulnerabilities, let’s actually fix them at scale.

[RohanKumar-wfsc]

Awesome talk, loved it!
I never knew about OpenRewrite before this talk. It's good to see such automation based initiatives in OSS to fix vulnerable code at such a large scale.