Episode 135: Akamai's Ryan Barnett on WAFs, Unicode Confusables, and Triage Stories

Episode 135: In this episode of Critical Thinking - Bug Bounty Podcast Justin sits down with Ryan Barnett for a deep dive on WAFs. We also recap his Exploiting Unicode Normalization talk from DEFCON, and get his perspective on bug hunting from his time at Akamai.
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====== Resources ======
Accidental Stored XSS Flaw in Zemanta 'Related Posts' Plugin for TypePad
webappdefender.blogspot.com/2013/04/accidental…
XSS Street-Fight
media.blackhat.com/bh-dc-11/Barnett/BlackHat_D…
Blackhat USA 2025 - Lost in Translation: Exploiting Unicode Normalization
blackhat.com/us-25/briefings/schedule/#lost-in…
====== Timestamps ======
(00:00:00) Introduction
(00:02:49) Accidental Stored XSS in Typepad Plugin
(00:06:34) Chatscatter & Abusing third party Analytics
(00:11:42) Ryan Barnett Introduction
(00:21:11) Virtual Patching & WAF Challenges
(00:40:39) AWS API Gateways & Whitelisting Bug Hunter Traffic
(00:49:59) Lost in Translation: Exploiting Unicode Normalization
(01:11:29) CSPs at the WAF level & 'Bounties for Bypass'