InfoQ Homepage Application Security Content on InfoQ
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Buildpacks Move the Container Hardening Control Point Away from the Dockerfile
Cloud Native Buildpacks, which graduated within the CNCF in July 2026, move base image choice out of per-service Dockerfiles into a single builder owned by platform engineering, enabling fleet-wide patching. BellSoft's hardened Paketo builder is the latest sign that vendors now treat the builder, not the Dockerfile, as the container security control point.
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npm Staged Publishing Available, Adding a Human Approval Step before Packages Go Live
npm has introduced staged publishing for Node.js, requiring maintainer approval before a version is installable. Versions are queued and must pass a two-factor authentication challenge for release. This feature aims to enhance security amid rising supply chain threats. It is available in npm CLI 11.15.0+ and Node 22.14.0+, alongside new configurable permission flags.
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HashiCorp Ships Public Beta of Vault Kubernetes Key Management
HashiCorp has released a public beta of Vault Kubernetes key management, a KMS v2-compatible plugin that lets the Kubernetes API server delegate envelope encryption to Vault Enterprise, moving the key encryption keys that protect etcd data out of the cluster and into a separately governed trust domain.
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Dropbox Integrates MCP and Dash to Close the Gap between Security Design and Code Review
Dropbox has integrated Model Context Protocol (MCP) with its internal knowledge platform, Dash, to surface security design context during AI assisted code reviews. The system retrieves threat models and security requirements for pull requests, helping reviewers validate implementation against design intent. An InfoQ Q&A explores the architecture and key lessons learned.
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Ink & Switch Introduces Bijou64: Canonical Variable-Length Integer Encoding for Safe Parsing
Ink & Switch published bijou64, a variable-length integer encoding where every number has exactly one byte representation, closing the canonicality bug class behind attacks on PKCS#1, JWT libraries, and Bitcoin. The design also decodes two to ten times faster than LEB128. Community ports to Elixir, Go, Perl, and Java followed, while HN commenters debated SIMD performance and residual range checks.
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GitLab 19.2 Puts AI Agents to Work on the Security Backlog
GitLab has released version 19.2 of its DevSecOps platform, adding agentic automation aimed at the security and review work that has piled up as AI coding tools generate more code than developers can check by hand. The release, announced on 16 July 2026, brings four features out of beta or into public beta: Dependency Scanning Auto-Remediation, Security Review Flow, GitLab Duo CLI and Custom Flows
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GitLab 19.0 Embeds Agentic AI in Secrets, Merge Requests, and Supply Chain Security
GitLab 19.0 extends agentic AI beyond code generation into securing credentials, reviewing and merging changes, and scanning dependencies, adding a public beta Secrets Manager, a full merge request Developer Flow, usage-based GitLab Duo billing, and generally available SBOM dependency scanning.
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VS Code 1.123 Adds Two-Hour Extension Update Delay to Limit Supply Chain Attacks
VS Code 1.123 adds a two-hour delay before auto-updating extensions to newly published versions, creating a revocation window against supply chain attacks. The delay does not apply to trusted publishers like Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI. Similar cooldown mechanisms have now spread across pip, RubyGems, npm, pnpm, Yarn, and Bun.
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A Trailing Slash Bypassed AWS API Gateway Authorization
A security researcher found that adding a trailing slash to AWS HTTP API paths bypassed Lambda authorizer authentication entirely, enabling unauthenticated wire transfers at a fintech. The root cause is a path normalization mismatch between HTTP API's greedy route matching and its authorization layer. The same vulnerability class appeared in gRPC-Go via CVE-2026-33186.
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TanStack Details Sophisticated npm Supply Chain Attack That Compromised 42 Packages
TanStack has released a detailed postmortem describing a sophisticated supply-chain attack that compromised 42 npm packages and published 84 malicious package versions in just six minutes, exposing developers and CI/CD systems to credential theft and malware propagation.
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Google Introduces Cloud Fraud Defense as Successor to reCAPTCHA
At the recent Next ‘26 conference, Google introduced Google Cloud Fraud Defense, the successor to reCAPTCHA. The platform goes beyond basic bot detection to address broader online fraud across login, account creation, and payment flows, helping organizations detect suspicious behavior and block abuse, including fake accounts, automated attacks, and transaction fraud.
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GitHub Expands Secret Scanning with General Availability of MCP Server Integration
GitHub has announced the general availability of secret scanning support through its MCP Server, extending automated credential detection and remediation capabilities into AI-assisted and agent-driven development workflows.
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Attacker Bought 30 WordPress Plugins on Flippa and Backdoored All of Them
An attacker purchased 30+ WordPress plugins on Flippa for six figures, planted a PHP deserialization backdoor in the first commit, and waited eight months before activating it across 400,000 installations. The attack used Ethereum smart contracts to resolve C2. WordPress.org has no mechanism for reviewing plugin ownership transfers, a gap that npm and PyPI addressed years ago.
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GitHub Enhances CodeQL with Declarative Security Modeling for Faster, More Flexible Analysis
GitHub has introduced a significant update to its CodeQL engine, enabling developers to define custom sanitizers and validators directly through "models-as-data," a move that simplifies how teams extend security analysis across their codebases.
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Meta's Approach to Migrating their Systems to Post-Quantum Cryptography
Meta has already begun preparing for the threats posed by quantum computing and migrating its systems to post-quantum cryptography, a complex process that will take multiple years to complete. In a recent article, Meta researchers outline their strategy and share key lessons learned along the way.