Jim Miller

A retrospective on the $100M Balancer hack that occurred in November 2025, including long-term, strategic guidance on how to avoid similar bugs.

The release of Bitchat last week was met with a mixture of glowing praise and sharp criticism. Both extremes bear some truth, but they also miss the mark and reveal gaps in how we discuss security in emerging products.

In October 2023, we audited Silence Laboratories’ DKLs23 threshold signature scheme (TSS) library—one of the first production implementations of this then-novel protocol that uses oblivious transfer (OT) instead of traditional Paillier cryptography. Our review uncovered serious flaws that could enable key destruction attacks, which Silence Laboratories promptly fixed.

Over two audits in 2023, we reviewed a blockchain system developed by Axiom that allows computing over the entire history of Ethereum, all verified by zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) on-chain using ZK-verified elliptic curve and SNARK recursion operations. This system is built using the Halo2 framework—a complex, emerging technology that presents many challenges when building a secure application, including potential under-constrained issues resulting from its low-level API.

In October 2023, Ockam hired Trail of Bits to review the design of its product, a set of protocols that aims to enable secure communication (i.e., end-to-end encrypted and mutually authenticated channels) across various heterogeneous networks. A secure system starts at the design […]

Our tool Circomspect is now integrated into the Sindri command-line interface (CLI)! We designed Circomspect to help developers build Circom circuits more securely, particularly given the limited tooling support available for this novel programming framework. Integrating this tool into a development environment like that provided by Sindri is a significant step toward […]

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 […]

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 […]

We discovered a critical vulnerability in Incognito Chain that would allow an attacker to mint arbitrary tokens and drain user funds. Incognito offers confidential transactions through zero-knowledge proofs, so an attacker could have stolen millions of dollars of shielded funds without ever being detected or identified. The vulnerability stemmed from an insecure […]

In part 1 of this blog post, we disclosed critical vulnerabilities that break the soundness of multiple implementations of zero-knowledge proof systems. This class of vulnerability, which we dubbed Frozen Heart, is caused by insecure implementations of the Fiat-Shamir transformation that allow malicious users to forge proofs for random statements. In part […]

In part 1 of this series, we disclosed critical vulnerabilities that break the soundness of multiple implementations of zero-knowledge proof systems. This class of vulnerability, which we dubbed Frozen Heart, is caused by insecure implementations of the Fiat-Shamir transformation that allow malicious users to forge proofs for random statements. In part 2, […]

In part 1 of this series, we disclosed critical vulnerabilities that break the soundness of multiple implementations of zero-knowledge proof systems. This class of vulnerability, which we dubbed Frozen Heart, is caused by insecure implementations of the Fiat-Shamir transformation that allow malicious users to forge proofs for random statements. The vulnerability is […]

Trail of Bits is publicly disclosing critical vulnerabilities that break the soundness of multiple implementations of zero-knowledge proof systems, including PlonK and Bulletproofs. These vulnerabilities are caused by insecure implementations of the Fiat-Shamir transformation that allow malicious users to forge proofs for random statements. We’ve dubbed this class of vulnerabilities Frozen Heart. […]

Trail of Bits is publicly disclosing two bugs that affect Shamir’s Secret Sharing implementation of Binance’s threshold signature scheme library (tss-lib) and most of its active forks. Here is the full list of affected repositories: Binance’s tss-lib Clover Network’s threshold-crypto Keep Network’s keep-ecdsa Swingby’s tss-lib THORchain’s tss-lib ZenGo X’s […]