Behind Ethereum’s powerful blockchain technology lies a lesser-known challenge that blockchain developers face: the intricacies of writing robust Ethereum ABI (Application Binary Interface) parsers. Ethereum’s ABI is critical to the blockchain’s infrastructure, enabling seamless interactions between smart contracts and external applications. The complexity of data types and the need for precise encoding […]
AI is becoming ubiquitous, as developers of widely used tools like GitHub and Photoshop are quickly implementing and iterating on AI-enabled features. With Microsoft’s recent integration of Copilot into Windows, AI is even on the old stalwart of computing—the desktop. The integration of an AI assistant into an entire operating system is a significant development that warrants investigation.
We’ve updated ZKDocs with four new sections and additions to existing content. ZKDocs provides explanations, guidance, and documentation for cryptographic protocols that are otherwise sparingly discussed but are used in practice. As such, we’ve added four new sections detailing common protocols that previously lacked implementation guidance: The Inner Product Argument (IPA), which […]
I’ve created five CodeQL queries that catch potentially potent bugs in the OpenSSL libcrypto API, a widely adopted but often unforgiving API that can be misused to cause memory leaks, authentication bypasses, and other subtle cryptographic issues in implementations. These queries—which I developed during my internship with my mentors, Fredrik Dahlgren and […]
This past summer at Trail of Bits was a season of inspiration, innovation, and growth thanks to the incredible contributions of our talented interns, who took on a diverse range of technical projects under the mentorship of Trail of Bits engineers. We’d like to delve into their accomplishments, from enhancing the efficiency of fuzzing tools […]
Trusted execution environments (TEE) such as secure enclaves are becoming more popular to secure assets in the cloud. Their promise is enticing because when enclaves are properly used, even the operator of the enclave or the cloud service should not be able to access those assets. However, this leads to […]
We’re thrilled to announce that Trail of Bits will be competing in DARPA’s upcoming AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC)! DARPA is challenging competitors to develop novel, fully automated AI-driven systems capable of securing the critical software that underpins the modern world. We’ve formed a team of world class software security and AI/ML experts, bringing together researchers, […]
Today we are announcing the latest addition to the Trail of Bits Testing Handbook: a brand new chapter on CodeQL! CodeQL is a powerful and versatile static analysis tool, and at Trail of Bits, we regularly use CodeQL on client engagements to find common vulnerabilities and to perform variant analysis for already […]
We are publishing a set of custom CodeQL queries for Go and C. We have used them to find critical issues that the standard CodeQL queries would have missed. This new release of a continuously updated repository of CodeQL queries joins our public Semgrep rules and Automated Testing Handbook in an effort […]
Why has Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) become so pivotal for endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions in Windows 10 and 11? The answer lies in the value of the intelligence it provides to security tools through secure ETW channels, which are now also a target for offensive researchers looking to bypass […]
The US government recently issued a request for information (RFI) about open-source software (OSS) security. In this blog post, we will present a summary of our response and proposed solutions. Some of our solutions include rewriting widely used legacy code in memory safe languages such as Rust, funding OSS solutions to improve […]
TL;DR: We identified 11 security vulnerabilities in YOLOv7, a popular computer vision framework, that could enable attacks including remote code execution (RCE), denial of service, and model differentials (where an attacker can trigger a model to perform differently in different contexts). Open-source software […]
This is a joint post with the PyPI maintainers; read their announcement here! This audit was sponsored by the Open Tech Fund as part of their larger mission to secure critical pieces of internet infrastructure. You can read the full report in our Publications repository. Late this summer, we performed an audit […]
This is a joint post with Alpha-Omega—read their announcement post as well! We’re starting a new project in collaboration with Alpha-Omega and OpenSSF to improve the transparency and security of Homebrew. This six-month project will bring cryptographically verifiable build provenance to homebrew-core, allowing end users and companies to prove that Homebrew’s packages come from the official Homebrew CI/CD.
Trail of Bits is publicly disclosing a vulnerability (CVE-2023-38596) that affects iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS before version 17, macOS before version 14, and watchOS before version 10. The flaw resides in Apple’s App Transport Security (ATS) protocol handling. We discovered that Apple’s ATS fails to require the encryption of connections to IP […]
Trail of Bits is publicly disclosing a vulnerability in the Osmosis chain that allows an attacker to craft a transaction that takes up a disproportionate amount of compute time on Osmosis nodes compared to the amount of gas it consumes. Using the vulnerability, an attacker can halt the Osmosis chain by spamming […]
Understanding and rigorously testing system invariants are essential aspects of developing robust smart contracts. Invariants are facts about the protocol that should remain true no matter what happens. Defining and testing these invariants allows developers to prevent the introduction of bugs and make their code more robust in the long term. However, it is difficult […]
eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) has emerged as the de facto Linux standard for security monitoring and endpoint observability. It is used by technologies such as BPFTrace, Cilium, Pixie, Sysdig, and Falco due to its low overhead and its versatility. There is, however, a dark (but open) secret: eBPF was never intended […]
We found a vulnerability in a threshold signature scheme that allows an attacker to recover the signing key of threshold ECDSA implementations that are based on Oblivious Transfer (OT). A malicious participant of the threshold signing protocols could perform selective abort attacks during the OT extension subprotocol, recover the secret […]
We identified 10 security vulnerabilities within the caddy-security plugin for the Caddy web server that could enable a variety of high-severity attacks in web applications, including client-side code execution, OAuth replay attacks, and unauthorized access to resources. During our evaluation, Caddy was deployed as a reverse proxy […]
Despite its use for refactoring and static analysis tooling, Clang has a massive shortcoming: the Clang AST does not provide provenance information about which CPP macro expansions a given AST node is expanded from; nor does it lower macro expansions down to LLVM Intermediate Representation (IR) code. This makes the construction of […]
tl;dr: Our publicly available Semgrep ruleset has nine new rules to detect misconfigurations of versions 3 and 4 of the Apollo GraphQL server. Try them out with semgrep –config p/trailofbits! When auditing several of our clients’ Apollo GraphQL servers, I kept finding the same issues over and over: cross-site request forgery (CSRF) […]
We’re proud to announce that iVerify is now an independent company following its four-year incubation at Trail of Bits. Originally developed in-house to ensure that our personal phones, which store data essential to our work and private lives, were secured to the standards of security professionals, iVerify quickly showed that it could be valuable to […]
Many security-critical off-chain applications use a simple block delay to determine finality: the point at which a transaction becomes immutable in a blockchain’s ledger (and is impossible to “undo” without extreme economic cost). But this is inadequate for most networks, and can become a single point of failure for the centralized exchanges, […]
One of the biggest challenges for blockchain developers is objectively assessing their security posture and measuring how it progresses. To address this issue, a working group of Web3 security experts, led by Trail of Bits CEO Dan Guido, met earlier this year to create a simple test for profiling the security of blockchain teams. We […]
