Yariv Tal
We keep saying “never trust user input.” Yet our frameworks still do not differentiate between trusted data and attacker-controlled data.
OWASP Untrust is an OWASP umbrella project built around a simple invariant: all data is implicitly untrusted and may cross security boundaries only through deliberate, verifiable trust transitions.
Through projects like VV (Validated Values) and BoxedPath, implemented across Python, Java, C#, C++, and Node.js, Untrust makes unsafe states structurally difficult to represent.
Instead of detecting vulnerabilities after they are written, Untrust enforces trust boundaries by construction for humans and AI alike.
Yariv Tal
Secure Coding Mentor
Yariv Tal is a senior developer, security researcher, and cofounder of Secure From Scratch, a venture dedicated to teaching developers secure coding from the very first line of code.
A summa cum laude graduate of the Technion, Yariv brings four decades of programming experience and years of university lecturing and bootcamp mentoring to the field of application security.
He lectures on secure coding in academia and the private sector, leads the OWASP-untrust project, and researches the intersection of AI and application security, with a focus on secure code generation, LLM evaluation, and secure-by-construction development.