Systemic security issues in blockchain projects often appear early in development. Without an initial focus on security, projects may choose flawed architectures or make insecure design or development choices that result in hard-to-maintain or vulnerable solutions. Traditional security reviews can be used to identify some security issues, but by the time they are complete, it […]
Have you ever wondered how a rollup and its base chain—the chain that the rollup commits state checkpoints to—communicate and interact? How can a user with funds only on the base chain interact with contracts on the rollup? In Arbitrum Nitro, one way to call a method on a contract deployed on […]
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 […]
Cosmos is a platform enabling the creation of blockchains in Go (or other languages). Its reference implementation, Cosmos SDK, leverages strong fuzz testing extensively, following two approaches: smart fuzzing for low-level code, and dumb fuzzing for high-level simulation. In this blog post, we explain the differences between these approaches and show how […]
At Trail of Bits, we pride ourselves on making our best tools open source, such as Slither, PolyTracker, and RPC Investigator. But while this post is about open source, it’s not about our tools… In 2023, our employees submitted over 450 pull requests (PRs) that were merged into non-Trail of Bits repositories. This demonstrates our […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
With the release of version 2.1.0 of Echidna, our fuzzing tool for Ethereum smart contracts, we’ve introduced new features for direct retrieval of on-chain data, such as contract code and storage slot values. This data can be used to fuzz deployed contracts in their on-chain state or to test […]
Holistic security reviews should reveal far more than simple bugs. Often, these bugs indicate deeper issues that can be challenging to understand and address. Given the time-boxed nature of reviews, security engineers may not have the opportunity to identify all bugs caused by these problems—and they may continue to […]
In March, I joined the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Technology Advisory Committee (TAC), helping the regulatory agency navigate the complexities of cybersecurity risks, particularly in emerging technologies like AI and blockchain. During the committee’s first meeting, I discussed how the rapidly changing and public nature of blockchain technology makes it uniquely susceptible […]
On March 28, 2023, SafeMoon, a self-styled “community-focused DeFi token” on Binance Smart Chain, lost the equivalent of $8.9 million in Binance Coin BNB to an exploit in a liquidity pool. The exploit leveraged a simple error introduced in an upgrade to SafeMoon’s SFM token contract, allowing the attacker to burn tokens held in the […]
Last September, Principal Security Engineer Dr. Evan Sultanik was on a panel hosted by the Naval Postgraduate School’s Distributed Consensus: Blockchain & Beyond (DC:BB) movement, where faculty and students there are seeking opportunities to learn and share knowledge, research, funding, and events focused on distributed consensus technologies. The panel of nine government, academia, and industry […]
