By Christian Presa Schnell During my winternship, I used the findings from recent Go audits to make several improvements to go-fuzz, a coverage-based fuzzer for projects written in Go. I focused on three enhancements to improve the effectiveness of Go fuzzing campaigns and provide a better experience for users. I contributed to fixing type alias […]
Search Results for: go
Smart (and simple) ways to prevent symlink attacks in Go
After writing Go for years, many of us have learned the error-checking pattern down to our bones: “Does this function return an error? Ope, better make sure it’s nil before moving on.” And that’s great! This should be our default behavior when writing Go. However, rote error checking can sometimes prevent critical thinking about what […]
Security flaws in an SSO plugin for Caddy
By Maciej Domanski, Travis Peters, and David Pokora 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 […]
How to check if a mutex is locked in Go
TL;DR: Can we check if a mutex is locked in Go? Yes, but not with a mutex API. Here’s a solution for use in debug builds. Although you can Lock() or Unlock() a mutex, you can’t check whether it’s locked. While it is a reasonable omission (e.g., due to possible race conditions; see also Why […]
Security assessment techniques for Go projects
The Trail of Bits Assurance practice has received an influx of Go projects, following the success of our Kubernetes assessment this summer. As a result, we’ve been adapting for Go projects some of the security assessment techniques and tactics we’ve used with other compiled languages. We started by understanding the design of the language, identifying […]
Panicking the right way in Go
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 […]
Why you should go to QueryCon this week
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 […]
Discovering goroutine leaks with Semgrep
By Alex Useche, Security Engineer Originally published May 10, 2021 While learning how to write multithreaded code in Java or C++ can make computer science students reconsider their career choices, calling a function asynchronously in Go is just a matter of prefixing a function call with the go keyword. However, writing concurrent Go code can […]
Reusable properties for Ethereum contracts
As smart contract security constantly evolves, property-based fuzzing has become a go-to technique for developers and security engineers. This technique relies on the creation of code properties – often called invariants – which describe what the code is supposed to do. To help the community define properties, we are releasing a set of 168 pre-built […]
We’re streamers now
Over the years, we’ve built many high-impact tools that we use for security reviews. You might know some of them, like Slither, Echidna, Amarna, Tealer, and test-fuzz. All of our tools are open source, and we love seeing the community benefit from them. But mastering our tools takes time and practice, and it’s easier if […]
