An Empirical Security Analysis of Open-Source Software Used in Onboard Satellite Systems
Study of 126 onboard satellite OSS repositories finds 2,827 security findings, 72% medium severity or higher, dominated by memory safety and code quality weaknesses.
Researchers performed an empirical security analysis of 126 public repositories of open-source software used in onboard satellite systems using SBOM generation, software composition analysis, static application security testing, infrastructure-as-code analysis, and secret scanning. After cleaning and deduplication the pipeline produced 2,827 findings, with medium-severity findings accounting for 49% and 72% classified medium or higher. A CWE-based taxonomy mapped all findings to eight weakness families, with Memory Safety and Code Quality dominating, followed by Input Validation and Injection. Project-developed code accounted for 81.4% of findings, though external dependency code remained relevant; findings do not establish mission-specific exploitability.
An Open-Source End-to-End FHE Implementation for Privacy-Preserving Llama 3 8B Inference
Odin runs Llama-3-8B fully homomorphic encrypted inference on a single H100 in 366 seconds, a 4.51x speedup over THOR.
Odin is an open-source end-to-end GPU CKKS implementation for privacy-preserving Llama-3-8B inference that co-designs ciphertext packing with model execution. A feature-major cross-layer layout unifies residual connections and layer interfaces, while transient intra-operator layouts serve linear projections and attention, avoiding intermediate repacking of QK^T softmax outputs. Minimax polynomial approximation with input-range control reduces polynomial degree and multiplicative depth for nonlinear ops. With 128-token input, Odin evaluates all 32 Transformer layers on one NVIDIA H100 80 GB in 366.4 s using 58.9 GiB peak memory, versus 1651.9 s for the THOR baseline, a 4.51x speedup.
Code review used to be the only way to catch these bugs
Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 says its NOVA system found 14,090 vulnerabilities in 3,915 open-source projects, mostly non-crashing bugs like access control flaws.
Unit 42's NOVA system analyzed 3,915 open-source projects over two months and reported 14,090 validated vulnerabilities, only 85 of which matched previously documented findings. 92% of findings fell outside fuzzing-friendly categories, clustering instead in access control, path traversal, injection, prototype pollution, and SSRF; language ecosystems showed distinct weakness profiles. Of 5,421 supply-chain findings, 1,280 were flaws in dependencies while 4,141 were downstream exposures, 2,776 validated with working proof-of-concepts. Unit 42 warned that faster discovery combined with an average 55-day patch deployment window has collapsed the patch-to-exploit gap.
Harnessing LLMs for Automating BOLA Detection
Unit 42's BOLABuster methodology uses LLMs to automate detection of broken object-level authorization vulnerabilities, uncovering flaws in Grafana, Harbor, and Easy!Appointments.
Palo Alto Unit 42 details BOLABuster, a methodology combining large language models with heuristics to automate detection of broken object-level authorization (BOLA) flaws, which traditional fuzzing and static analysis struggle to find. The approach uses LLM reasoning to understand application logic, map endpoint dependency relationships, and generate and interpret test cases. It found CVE-2024-1313 in Grafana, CVE-2024-22278 in Harbor, and 15 CVEs in Easy!Appointments. The team is continuing to hunt for BOLAs in open-source and internal projects.
Exploits and vulnerabilities in Q2 2026
Kaspersky's Q2 2026 report tallies vulnerability, exploit, and C2 framework statistics, adding first-ever data on open-source AI framework flaws.
Kaspersky Securelist released its quarterly report on vulnerabilities, exploits, and C2 frameworks for Q2 2026. The report aggregates statistics on vulnerability disclosures and exploit activity for the quarter. For the first time, it also aggregates data on vulnerabilities in open-source AI agents and AI frameworks, extending coverage into the AI software supply chain.
Propagation Model for SSC attacks: Why SBOM (tools) don't tell the whole truth
Study shows open-source SBOM tools only cover structural exposure and vulnerability presence, missing code reachability and taint-path analysis stages.
An arXiv paper proposes a four-stage propagation model for software supply chain attack effects and empirically evaluates four open-source SBOM tools against it using three projects and the Log4j vulnerability as the test case. Current SBOM tools systematically support only Stage 1 (structural exposure) and Stage 2 (vulnerability class presence), while Stage 3 (code reachability) and Stage 4 (taint path analysis) require capabilities absent from the SBOM ecosystem. The authors argue propagation-centred SSC security research is needed to prevent cyber risk from evolving into systemic risk.
The Machine With Many Faces: Post-Exploitation Identity Misuse in SPIFFE/SPIRE
Unit 42 demonstrates that root access on a Kubernetes node lets attackers spoof SPIFFE/SPIRE attestation and harvest co-located workloads' SVIDs.
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 describes post-exploitation techniques in which an attacker with root on a compromised Kubernetes node spoofs Linux cgroup metadata used by the SPIRE agent during workload attestation, tricking it into issuing a co-located workload's SPIFFE Verifiable Identity Document to an attacker-controlled process. The research shows the core trust assumption of machine-identity systems—that the node is trusted—collapses once root is obtained, exposing all cryptographic identities scoped to that node. Unit 42 released an open-source tool, Spooffe, for defenders to test identity exposure, and notes the technique has not been observed exploited in the wild.