I tested 25 of the most popular package managers to check whether they detect a compromised package repository injecting malicious code into legitimate packages. Only two verified the integrity of every package they downloaded.
We’re releasing SequenceHash and its sister function SequenceMAC, a pair of related hash constructions that bring secure multihashing to developers using hash functions other than Keccak.
Combining threshold signature schemes with trusted execution environments (TEEs) can strengthen MPC deployments, as long as you treat the TEE as a defense-in-depth layer rather than a substitute for a sound protocol.
Before code review even starts, agents let us build custom tooling and formal models. Here’s how six months of building with AI agents helped us find real issues in our Miden zkVM audit.
Signal recently launched Automatic Key Verification, a feature that helps validate that your chats are secure without requiring direct safety number comparison. Trail of Bits built and operates one of the three auditors that make this system trustworthy.
This blog post details security risks to consider when integrating AWS Nitro Enclaves with AWS KMS.
We added post-quantum cryptography support to pyca/cryptography, the eleventh most-downloaded Python package on PyPI, putting quantum-resistant ML-KEM and ML-DSA algorithms one pip install away for the entire Python ecosystem.
We found hundreds of weak RSA and DSA keys with biased bits that we could quickly factor using a new polynomial-based cryptanalytic technique.
Trail of Bits discovered and exploited memory safety and logic vulnerabilities in Google’s Rust zero-knowledge proof code to forge a proof claiming better quantum circuit performance metrics than Google’s original results, demonstrating unique security risks in zkVM systems.
Our audit of WhatsApp’s new “Private Inference” feature shows that trusted execution environments (TEEs) aren’t a silver bullet.
Two popular AES libraries (aes-js and pyaes) provide dangerous default IVs that lead to key/IV reuse vulnerabilities affecting thousands of projects. One maintainer dismissed the issue, while strongSwan’s maintainer exemplified proper security response by comprehensively fixing the vulnerability in their VPN management tool.
Trail of Bits engineers contributed over 375 merged pull requests to more than 90 open-source projects in 2025, including significant work on Sigstore rekor-monitor, the Rust compiler and Clippy, pyca/cryptography’s ASN.1 API, hevm performance optimizations, PyPI Warehouse, and pwndbg.
We collaborated with the Sigstore community to build cryptographic agility into the software signing ecosystem, enabling organizations to use different signing algorithms while maintaining security through predefined algorithm suites and out-of-band configuration rather than dangerous in-band signaling.
Trail of Bits developed constant-time coding support for LLVM that prevents compilers from breaking cryptographic implementations vulnerable to timing attacks, introducing the __builtin_ct_select family of intrinsics that preserve constant-time properties throughout compilation.
Trail of Bits discovered and disclosed two vulnerabilities in the widely used elliptic JavaScript library that could allow signature forgery or prevent valid signature verification, with one vulnerability still unfixed after the 90-day disclosure window.
We’ve released open-source Go implementations of ML-DSA and SLH-DSA.
This blog post describes how electronic passports work, the threats within their threat model, and how they protect against those threats using cryptography. It also discusses the implications of using electronic passports for novel applications, such as zero-knowledge identity proofs.
Trail of Bits is disclosing vulnerabilities in confidential computing systems that use LUKS2 for disk encryption. These vulnerabilities allow attackers with access to storage disks to extract confidential data and modify contents.
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.
This post will examine the cryptography behind passkeys, the guarantees they do or do not give, and interesting cryptographic things you can do with them, such as generating cryptographic keys and storing certificates.
We’re working on integrating an ASN.1 API into PyCA Cryptography,
built on top of the same Rust ASN.1 implementation already used by
Cryptography’s X.509 APIs.
Key derivation is essential in many cryptographic applications, including key exchange, key management, secure communications, and building robust cryptographic primitives. But it’s also easy to get wrong: although standard tools exist for different key derivation needs, our audits often uncover improper uses of these tools that could compromise key security. Flickr’s API […]
While Trail of Bits is known for developing security tools like Slither, Medusa, and Fickling, our engineering efforts extend far beyond our own projects. Throughout 2024, our team has been deeply engaged with the broader security ecosystem, tackling challenges in open-source tools and infrastructure that security engineers rely on every day. This year, our engineers […]
