OWASP Global AppSec USA 2026: Full Schedule

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10:30am PST

When the Fraud Analyst Becomes an Agent: Threat Modeling Autonomy in High-Stakes AppSec Workflows

Thursday November 5, 2026 10:30am - 11:15am PST

Most teams running fraud or abuse detection already have an AI assistant in the queue: it reads the signals on a flagged account, drafts a case summary, and a person decides what to do. What's changing is that these assistants are being given tools, memory, and the ability to act — to hold a transfer, freeze an account, file a report — usually a step at a time, without anyone treating it as a design decision.

That step changes the security problem. An assistant produces text a person reviews, so its mistakes get caught at the desk. An agent produces actions a system carries out, and the human review that used to sit in the path often no longer does. The failure modes you already know get more expensive, and a few new ones show up that don't exist when the output is only a summary.

This session is a threat model of that transition. It maps the agent's attack surface to the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications, and for each risk it works through how an existing control has to change — input sanitization to intent checks, schema-constrained output to least-privilege tools, human-in-the-loop to hard limits on what an agent can do on its own.

The examples come from financial fraud and abuse work, where the actions are irreversible and have to hold up to an audit. The approach applies to any application, API, or workflow that lets an AI act. You'll leave with a checklist and a short list of decisions to take back to your own systems.

Assumes familiarity with application security and threat modeling. No machine-learning background required.

Speakers

Hamza Abubakar Kheruwala

Software engineer securing AI that can act

Hamza Abubakar Kheruwala is a software engineer whose work spans AI-assisted risk, fraud, and security systems in regulated environments, where automated decisions have to be auditable and hold up to review. That work covers telemetry pipelines, anomaly detection, and the LLM-assisted... Read More →

Thursday November 5, 2026 10:30am - 11:15am PST
Room: Grand Ballroom C (Street Level)

Planning and Design

Audience Advanced

10:30am PST

Hacking Your Life with AI Can Get You Hacked: How AI Orchestration Platforms Ship RCE by Design

Thursday November 5, 2026 10:30am - 11:15am PST

Room: Seacliff AB (Bay Level)

AI orchestration platforms promise to automate your life. They deliver, just not always for you. Kestra, Langflow, Nocobase, Flowise, Activepieces, Dify, and Apache Airflow have quietly become critical infrastructure, and they all share the same dangerous assumption: anyone who can touch a workflow is trusted to run code on the host.

I went hunting across seven major platforms and walked out with multiple CVEs and critical-severity findings. I'll share an arsenal of RCE primitives: shell injection through template rendering, exec() on user-supplied "validation" code, eval() on raw LLM output, and unauthenticated API endpoints that hand you a shell. Then I'll demonstrate the kill shot: an unauthenticated attacker achieving full RCE through a single prompt injection into an LLM module.

When I reported these, some vendors told me code execution is intended behavior and security is the deployer's problem. I'll show you why that argument falls apart in real deployments, and walk through the trust boundary failures that keep producing the same bugs across the ecosystem.

You'll leave with a methodology for tearing these platforms apart, a catalog of recurring vulnerability patterns, and a framework for evaluating whether a platform's threat model survives contact with reality.

Speakers

Peyton Kennedy

Senior Security Researcher, Endor Labs

Peyton Kennedy is a Senior Security Researcher, where he conducts security research on emerging open source technologies and analyzes vulnerabilities for the betterment of the community. Recent work has focused on AI and LLM integrations within open source projects and how trust boundaries... Read More →

Thursday November 5, 2026 10:30am - 11:15am PST
Room: Seacliff AB (Bay Level)

Testing

Audience Advanced

1:15pm PST

Controlling Decryption in Zero Trust Cloud Workloads

Thursday November 5, 2026 1:15pm - 2:00pm PST

Room: Grand Ballroom C (Street Level)

Cloud applications are increasingly used to process highly sensitive artifacts such as adversary simulation reports, threat intelligence, and vulnerability assessments. While encryption in transit and at rest is now standard, it does not answer a harder question: when and under what conditions should an application be allowed to see plaintext data?

This session presents a practical design for securely processing sensitive workloads in the cloud. The approach is simple in principle: data remains encrypted by default, and decryption is allowed only within explicitly authorized and tightly controlled execution paths.

We walk through a real-world architecture that combines client-side encryption, per-document keys, non-exportable asymmetric keys, policy-driven key release, role-based access control, and in-memory processing. In this model, documents are encrypted before upload, keys are isolated, and decryption happens only after identity, role, and workflow checks succeed. Plaintext exists only briefly during processing and is never persisted beyond that boundary.

What makes this approach different is how decryption itself becomes a controlled, auditable event, rather than an implicit capability of the application once access is granted.

The session also covers a production-inspired workflow where sensitive security reports are analyzed to extract actionable insights for defensive teams. This example shows how downstream processing systems (including AI-assisted analysis) can be introduced without expanding the attack surface.

Attendees will leave with a concrete design pattern for reducing plaintext exposure in cloud applications, along with practical guidance on applying these principles to their own systems. The focus is on patterns that can be applied broadly to sensitive workloads, not just this specific use case.

Speakers

Anjali Mangal

Principal Director of Security Research, Microsoft

Anjali Mangal is a Principal Director of Security Research at Microsoft, where she leads security validation, adversary emulation, and AI security initiatives across Microsoft Security products and services. Anjali's work spans threat intelligence, detection engineering, cloud security... Read More →

Vamshi Krishna Thotempudi

Senior Applied Data Scientist, focused on AI/ML, LLM-driven automation, and cloud-scale threat detection, Microsoft Security Research

Vamshi Krishna Thotempudi is a Senior Applied Data Scientist at Microsoft Security Research, working on AI/ML-driven automation, LLM-based security research, and cloud-scale threat detection. He has 13 years of experience across artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language... Read More →

Mahima Agarwal

Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Microsoft Security

Mahima Agarwal is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Microsoft Security specializing in the intersection of AI, machine learning, and cybersecurity. Her work focuses on building large-scale systems for threat detection, security analytics, and detection engineering, including the... Read More →

Raghav Batta

Principal Manager in AI Security Research, Microsoft Security,

Raghav Batta is a Principal Manager in AI Security Research at Microsoft Security, where he leads research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. His work focuses on applying large language models, agentic AI, and large-scale machine learning to improve... Read More →

Thursday November 5, 2026 1:15pm - 2:00pm PST
Room: Grand Ballroom C (Street Level)

Planning and Design

Audience Advanced

2:15pm PST

The Compromised Maintainer Problem: Detecting Malicious Code in Legitimate Dependencies

Thursday November 5, 2026 2:15pm - 3:00pm PST

Room: Grand Ballroom A (Street Level)

Supply chain attacks have changed. A few years ago the story was typosquatting and obviously sketchy packages with five downloads. Today it is the opposite. Attackers are going after the packages you already trust, the ones with millions of weekly installs and maintainers you have heard of. XZ Utils, the wave of npm maintainer account takeovers, self-replicating worms like Shai-Hulud, leaked PyPI tokens in public CI logs. The pattern is consistent and it is getting worse.

The hard part is that traditional tooling does not catch any of this. SCA scanners look for known CVEs, but there is no advisory yet. The package name is legitimate. The signature checks out. By the time the ecosystem catches up, the malicious version has already shipped to production for thousands of teams.

In this session we will share what we have learned building detection for these attacks across npm, PyPI, NuGet, and Go. We will walk through a few recent real incidents, the behavioral signals that gave them away (suspicious postinstall scripts, network callbacks, obfuscated payloads, anomalous maintainer activity), and why waiting for a CVE will always leave you exposed. From there we will get practical: pre install scanning, sandboxing build steps, lockfile pinning with provenance verification, and monitoring for dependency drift over time.

Attendees will leave with a clear mental model of how modern package attacks unfold, detection patterns they can apply to their own pipelines, and an honest read on where current tooling falls short. Aimed at AppSec engineers, platform teams, and developers who own anything in CI/CD or dependency policy.

Speakers

Polina Moshenets

Security Engineer and Founder, SichGate

Polina Moshenets is a Security Engineer and Founder of SichGate, an AI model integrity testing company focused on safety and security evaluation of language models in highly regulated industries. Her background spans application security, supply chain risk in AI/ML pipelines, and... Read More →

Amro Haddadah

Founder, CyberXYZ

Amro is the founder of CyberXYZ and a veteran of Microsoft’s DFIR team, where he spent five years investigating advanced cyber threats. He later led enterprise security as Principal Architect at Roche. Today, he’s building AI-native defenses to detect and stop zero-day attacks... Read More →

Thursday November 5, 2026 2:15pm - 3:00pm PST
Room: Grand Ballroom A (Street Level)

Deployment and Maintenance

Audience Advanced

3:30pm PST

Model Context Points of Failure: MCP Security Meets Scale

Thursday November 5, 2026 3:30pm - 4:15pm PST

Room: Grand Ballroom A (Street Level)

MCP servers are an integral part of our AI agents, coding assistants and LLMs. But how secure are they? Can we trust publicly deployed MCP servers? What about the MCP infrastructure itself?

This talk on MCP security will walk through a full from top to bottom MCP analysis, starting from the MCP source code, MCP protocol exploits, prompt injection, vulnerable MCP servers, vulnerabilities in public MCP servers, and weaponizing MCP servers.

Our research combines an analysis of over 18,000 MCP servers served on public registries, 3,000 open-source AI projects. We’ll share how we were able to find exploits on both public deployments serving MCP connectors, and taking over abandoned MCP servers.

We’ll go in depth on how multiple classes of vulnerabilities and issues which endanger the MCP ecosystem, from local command execution, unauthenticated remote command execution, attacking AI orchestration systems, MCP server information stealing, and even data sovereignty breaches. We’ll include demos and POCs, demonstrating how we exploited each vulnerability class one by one.

Finally, we’ll go over how to tackle those issues inside a living breathing organization, working with best practices to secure MCP deployments and connectors, how we can practically collect and block MCP configurations in scale, and what organizations can do to prevent the next breach.

Speakers

Moshe Siman Tov Bustan

Security Research Team Leader, OX Security

Moshe is a Security Research Team Leader at OX Security, a company specializing in software supply chain security, and has worked in the security industry for 13 years. His work spans cloud security research, container security, memory forensics, and an in-depth understanding of programming... Read More →

Thursday November 5, 2026 3:30pm - 4:15pm PST
Room: Grand Ballroom A (Street Level)

Deployment and Maintenance

Audience Advanced

3:30pm PST

Pattern, Graph, Prompt: What Happens When You Layer Three Analysis Paradigms on the Same Codebase

Thursday November 5, 2026 3:30pm - 4:15pm PST

Room: Grand Ballroom B (Street Level)

We ran three fundamentally different security analysis approaches against the same production monorepo at a large tech company: a pattern-based static analysis tool, a code property graph analyzer, and LLM-powered code review. Together they surfaced over 150 confirmed or validated security findings.

Each approach has real strengths and real limitations. Pattern-based static analysis is fast and deterministic but struggles with complex taint propagation and cannot reason about logic. Graph-based analysis can trace dataflow across the entire codebase but has no concept of developer intent. LLM-powered review can reason about whether a security mechanism actually does what it claims, but it is non-deterministic, expensive, and cannot guarantee exhaustive coverage the way a static tool can.

We present a practical methodology for layering these approaches, share the detection overlap data from our analysis, and provide a framework for deciding which paradigm to apply where.

Speakers

Mudita Khurana

Staff Security Engineer, Airbnb

Mudita Khurana is a Tech Lead at Airbnb, where she builds scalable security tooling and automation across the software development lifecycle. Previously at Meta, she drove key initiatives in product security, including bug bounty strategy, privacy-focused reviews, and automated vulnerability... Read More →

Thursday November 5, 2026 3:30pm - 4:15pm PST
Room: Grand Ballroom B (Street Level)

Implementation

Audience Advanced

3:30pm PST

Assume Code Execution: Securing Multi-Tenant Code-Ingestion Platforms

Thursday November 5, 2026 3:30pm - 4:15pm PST

Room: Grand Ballroom C (Street Level)

In December 2025 someone tried to break into a multi-tenant scanning platform. The payloads were the interesting part: a symlink pointing at /proc/self/environ, a beacon built to phone home, a dependency wired to a server the attacker controlled. They were templated, clearly meant to be fired at a dozen vendors with small tweaks. And they raised a question I don't think most teams ever ask about their own product. What happens when the code you ingest actually runs?

Here is the assumption I want to kill: that analyzing a repository is a read-only thing. It isn't. If your service takes in customer code or config, and that includes CI tools, dependency analyzers, SBOM generators, IDE plugin backends, scanners, and now AI coding assistants, then you are running attacker-controlled input whether you meant to or not. The line between parsing something and executing it has basically dissolved. A config file loads external checks, a package manifest runs lifecycle scripts during install, and a gemspec gets evaluated as code. A symlink walks right out of your sandbox.

This is a design talk, and the thing you take home is a design artifact: a four-question threat model you can point at any boundary where your system ingests code, and five controls that map one-to-one onto those questions and shut the risk down. I call the questions the Four E's: Execute, Expose, Exfiltrate, Expand. Used at design time, they find the exposure before a single line of exploit code exists, and the architecture that answers them falls out almost on its own. You design so that even when the ingested code runs, and it will, none of it matters.

The questions came out of testing 20 hosted platforms, with out-of-band beacons doing the confirming because these attacks are completely blind from the outside. Five of those platforms failed all four questions in practice and leaked production credentials. I will show you enough of that to prove the model holds up, but the breakage is not the reason to come. The reference architecture is.

You will leave with four questions that find the risk and five controls that shut it down, plus a detection trick that turns an attacker's first probe into your first alert. There is also an open-source, MIT-licensed tool that lets you run it all against your own boundary, the same week.

Speakers

Raphael Karger

Co-founder and CTO, ZeroPath

Raphael Karger is Co-founder and CTO of ZeroPath, an AI-native application security company and RSAC 2026 Innovation Sandbox finalist. He leads the core product and security research, which has disclosed vulnerabilities in curl, ffmpeg, sudo, and the Linux kernel. Previously, he was... Read More →

Thursday November 5, 2026 3:30pm - 4:15pm PST
Room: Grand Ballroom C (Street Level)

Planning and Design

Audience Advanced

10:30am PST

10:30am PST

1:15pm PST

2:15pm PST

3:30pm PST

3:30pm PST

3:30pm PST

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