Over the past few years, I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit in the weeds — reviewing reports, fixing recurring bugs, writing guidance that never scales. Like many in AppSec, I’ve asked myself: Why are we still fixing the same bug classes in 2025 that we were in 2015? This frustration was the starting point for something more…
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This week, the students in my Security Hackathon class at DHBW presented their final projects. The format was simple: each group selected one of the OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls and explored it in depth. The results were more than I had hoped for. While it wasn’t required to build a working project, many groups chose to go beyond expectations,…
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This is Part 3 of a series of multiple Cloudflare-related blog posts. Now that we have Cursor and vibe coding simple ideas into a working MVP is fun and gives you fast results, I gave it a try, one of the projects I created is: https://cf-relay.javan.de Advanced HTTP proxy using Cloudflare’s IP range to bypass IP-based restrictions, rate limiting, and…
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First two search results for “blocking origin access directly” on Google showed me two misleading Cloudflare community threads, with wrong security assumption, which is why I decided to write this guide. [1] [2] The best and recommended solution is using Authenticated Origin Pulls with custom certs per domain, but as this is not trivial to set up I decided write about…
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Ever since I installed a LEDA LUC2 fireplace, I wanted deeper insights into how it operates — particularly pressure difference, exhaust temperature, and ventilation state. Unfortunately, the vendor doesn’t provide any integration options, and the only external interface is a mysterious RJ12 port on the controller. So I decided to reverse engineer it myself. In this post, I’ll walk you…
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Reflections from BSides Canberra 2023 to the Securing Sage Summit 2025 Last month at the Securing Sage Summit, I watched Sonya M. from Snyk give a slick, fast-paced live demo using GitHub Copilot. It was exactly the kind of session that draws a crowd — showing how quickly AI can help generate code from natural language prompts. But then it…
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Maybe it’s just the talks I’ve attended and articles I read. Maybe it’s just my rabbit hole that I went into. Or maybe… we’re all collectively realising the same thing. I hit a wall. At the end of 2024, I went all-in on automation. I built MVPs, tested capabilities, and made it my mission to influence others to do the…
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In the early days of web development, PHP developers often relied on functions like mysql_escape_string() to sanitize user inputs. However, this approach was fraught with pitfalls. Misuse, incorrect character encoding handling, and a lack of awareness led to numerous vulnerabilities. To address these issues, mysql_real_escape_string() was introduced, which considered the current character set of the database connection, offering a more…
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Jason Chan’s article “Security for High Velocity Engineering” hit me hard. It captures a reality many of us in Product Security face: engineering teams move fast, and unless your security program evolves beyond one-off engagements and reactive fixes, you’ll constantly be playing catch-up. The Fragile Model: When 1:1 Investment Walks Out the Door When I started out as an AppSec…
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At DEFCON32, my colleague Andra Lezza and I presented a talk on building and securing LLM applications – particularly chatbots – drawing from our work at Sage. One of the highlights of our talk was a practical proof of concept: a smart home setup using Home-Assistant.io, which we showcased to demonstrate safety implications and security considerations of AI-integrated applications. In…
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