Has it really been 3 months since Trail of Bits hosted QueryCon? We’ve had such a busy and productive summer that we nearly forgot to go back and reflect on the success of this event! On June 20-21, Trail of Bits partnered with Kolide and Carbon Back to host the 2nd annual QueryCon, at the […]
This year’s IACR Crypto conference was an excellent blend of far-out theory and down-to-earth pragmatism. A major theme throughout the conference was the huge importance of getting basic cryptographic primitives right. Systems ranging from TLS servers and bitcoin wallets to state-of-the-art secure multiparty computation protocols were broken when one small sub-component was either chosen poorly […]
We are proud to announce the integration of ensemble fuzzing into DeepState, our unit-testing framework powered by fuzzing and symbolic execution. Ensemble fuzzing allows testers to execute multiple fuzzers with varying heuristics in a single campaign, while maintaining an architecture for synchronizing generated input seeds across […]
As a summer intern at Trail of Bits, I’ve been working on building Fennec, a tool to automatically replace function calls in compiled binaries that’s built on top of McSema, a binary lifter developed by Trail of Bits. The Problem Let’s say you have a compiled binary, but you […]
KLEE-Native, a fork of KLEE that operates on binary program snapshots by lifting machine code to LLVM bitcode.
We open-sourced a set of static analysis tools, KRFAnalysis, that analyze and triage output from our system call (syscall) fault injection tool KRF. Now you can easily figure out where and why, KRF crashes your programs. During my summer internship at Trail of Bits, I worked on KRF, […]
During my summer at Trail of Bits, I took full advantage of the latest C++ language features to build a new SQLite wrapper from scratch that is easy to use, lightweight, high performant, and concurrency friendly—all in under 750 lines of code.
People interested in joining Trail of Bits often ask us what it’s like to work on the Engineering Services team. We felt that the best answer would be a profile of some of the talented individuals on our team, and let them describe their experiences at Trail of Bits in their own words. Today, we’re […]
Until now, smart contract security researchers (and developers) have been frustrated by limited information about the actual flaws that survive serious development efforts. That limitation increases the risk of making critical smart contracts vulnerable, misallocating resources for risk reduction, and missing opportunities to employ automated analysis tools. We’re changing that. Today, Trail of Bits is […]
In an age of online second-hand retailers, marketplace exchanges, and third-party refurb shops, it’s easier than ever to save hundreds of dollars when buying a phone. These channels provide an appealing alternative for people foregoing a retail shopping experience for a hefty discount. However, there is an additional option for those bargain hunters seeking even […]
Broadly, an end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol is one that ensures that only the participants in a conversation, and no intermediate servers, routers, or relay systems, can read and write messages. An end-to-end encrypted group messaging protocol is one that ensures this for all participants in a conversation of three or more people. End-to-end encrypted group […]
Note: This blog has been reposted from Truffle Suite’s blog. We are proud to announce our new smart contract security product:
https://crytic.io/. Crytic provides continuous assurance for smart contracts. The platform reports build status on every commit and runs a suite of security analyses for immediate feedback. The beta will be open soon. Follow us […]
Trail of Bits recently completed a security assessment of Kubernetes, including its interaction with Docker. Felix Wilhelm’s recent tweet of a Proof of Concept (PoC) “container escape” sparked our interest, since we performed similar research and were curious how this PoC could impact Kubernetes. Quick and dirty way to get out of a privileged k8s […]
Trail of Bits was among the select companies that Forrester invited to participate in its recent report, The Forrester Wave™: Midsize Cybersecurity Consulting Services, Q2 2019. In this evaluation, Trail of Bits was cited as a Leader. We received the highest score among all participants in the current offering category, among the highest scores in […]
LibraBFT is the Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithm used by the recently released Libra cryptocurrency. LibraBFT is based on another BFT consensus algorithm called HotStuff. While some have noted the similarities between the two algorithms, they differ in some crucial respects. In this post we highlight one such difference: in LibraBFT, non-leaders perform broadcasts. […]
Here at Trail of Bits we review a lot of code. From major open source projects to exciting new proprietary software, we’ve seen it all. But one common denominator in all of these systems is that for some inexplicable reason people still seem to think RSA is a good cryptosystem to use. Let me save […]
A denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability, dubbed ‘Gridlock,’ was publicly reported on July 1st in one of Edgeware’s smart contracts deployed on Ethereum. As much as $900 million worth of Ether may have been processed by this contract. Edgeware has since acknowledged and fixed the “fatal bug.” When we heard about Gridlock, we ran Slither on the […]
RandomX is a new ASIC and GPU-resistant proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm originally developed for Monero, but potentially useful in any blockchain using PoW that wants to bias towards general purpose CPUs. Trail of Bits was contracted by Arweave to review this novel algorithm in a two person-week engagement and provide guidance on alternate parameter selection. But […]
Today we released a tool, siderophile, that helps Rust developers find fuzzing targets in their codebases. Siderophile trawls your crate’s dependencies and attempts to finds every unsafe function, expression, trait method, etc. It then traces these up the callgraph until it finds the function in your crate that uses the unsafety. It ranks the functions […]
With the release of C++14, the standards committee strengthened one of the coolest modern features of C++: constexpr. Now, C++ developers can write constant expressions and force their evaluation at compile-time, rather than at every invocation by users. This results in faster execution, smaller executables and, surprisingly, safer code. Undefined behavior has been the source […]
A common Go idiom is to (1) panic, (2) recover from the panic in a deferred function, and (3) continue on. In general, this is okay, so long there are no global state changes between the entry point to the function calling defer, and the point at which the panic occurs. Such global state changes […]
Each year, Trail of Bits runs a month-long winter internship aka “winternship” program. This year we were happy to host 4 winterns who contributed to 3 projects. This project comes from Carson Harmon, a new graduate from Purdue interested in compilers and systems engineering, and a new full-time member of our research practice. I set […]
Since March, Trail of Bits has been working with the Python Software Foundation to add two-factor authentication (2FA) to Warehouse, the codebase that powers PyPI. As of today, PyPI members can enable time-based OTP (TOTP) and WebAuthn (currently in beta). If you have an account on PyPI, go enable your preferred 2FA method before you […]
Three weeks ago, we presented our work on Slither at WETSEB, an ICSE workshop. ICSE is a top-tier academic conference, focused on software engineering. This edition of the event went very well. The organizers do their best to attract and engage industrials to the discussions. The conference had many talks in parallel. We wish we […]
QueryCon takes place this week at the Convene Conference Center in Downtown Manhattan, Thursday June 20th- Friday June 21st. If you don’t have a ticket yet, get one while you can. QueryCon is an annual conference about osquery, the open source project that’s helping many top tech companies manage their endpoints. We’ve been big fans […]
