Application Security
In-depth guides and analysis on application security from the Safeguard engineering team.
490 articles
A practical guide to bug bounty hunting
HackerOne alone has paid hackers over $300M since 2012, but most new researchers earn nothing — duplicates, not skill gaps, are the top reason first reports fail.
An introduction to C and C++ memory-safety vulnerabilities
Microsoft has reported that roughly 70% of the CVEs it patches each year trace back to memory-safety bugs — here's what buffer overflows, use-after-free, and double-free actually look like.
Apache Struts and the recurring pattern of path-traversal and RCE bugs
Equifax lost data on 147 million people to one unpatched Struts CVE in 2017 — and the same class of bug resurfaced in Struts as recently as December 2023.
CVE-2024-22195: how Jinja2's xmlattr filter opened an XSS hole
A single filter in Jinja, xmlattr, could inject arbitrary HTML attributes and slip past autoescaping entirely — fixed in Jinja 3.1.3, tracked as CVE-2024-22195.
PHP Laravel security best practices
One line, `protected $guarded = [];`, can turn a Laravel signup form into an admin-account minting machine — here's how to lock down five real Laravel risk areas.
Preventing SQL injection in Node.js applications
CWE-89 is a 25-year-old bug class, but Node's template literals make it trivially easy to reintroduce in mysql2, pg, and even Sequelize's raw-query escape hatch.
Preventing SSRF in Node.js applications
A single unvalidated URL in a fetch or axios call can let an attacker reach 169.254.169.254 and steal cloud credentials — as the 2019 Capital One breach showed.
Securing Python Virtual Environments
A single sudo pip install can overwrite files an OS package manager owns — PEP 668 exists because that anti-pattern was common enough to break Linux distros.
The Python pickle security model, explained
Python's own docs warn that unpickling can execute arbitrary code — yet pickle is still the default weight format behind millions of ML model downloads.
Can an LLM find the same bug twice? What repeatability benchmarking reveals
In a 300-run benchmark, the best LLM scanner hit 75.4% F1 while a deterministic SAST baseline hit 100% — but the real story is in what varies between runs.
Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration for Application Security
NIST finalized PQC standards in 2024, but most companies can't even inventory where RSA and ECC live in their stack. Here's a realistic migration roadmap for AppSec teams.
What Is Application Security (AppSec) 101
AppSec used to mean scanning code for known bugs. Here's why that's no longer enough, what CVE-matching tools like Snyk miss, and what a real supply chain security program requires.
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