Today we are disclosing a denial-of-service vulnerability that affects the Pedersen distributed key generation (DKG) phase of a number of threshold signature scheme implementations based on the Frost, DMZ21, GG20, and GG18 protocols. The vulnerability allows a single malicious participant to surreptitiously raise the threshold required to reconstruct the shared key, which […]
This post, part of a series on cryptography in the cloud, provides an overview of the cloud cryptography services offered within Amazon Web Services (AWS): when to use them, when not to use them, and important usage considerations. Stay tuned for future posts covering other cloud services. At Trail of Bits, we […]
Last month, two of our engineers attended the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37C3) in Hamburg, joining thousands of hackers who gather each year to exchange the latest research and achievements in technology and security. Unlike other tech conferences, this annual gathering focuses on the interaction of technology and society, covering such topics as politics, entertainment, […]
For the past eight months, Trail of Bits has worked with the Python Cryptographic Authority to build cryptography-x509-verification, a brand-new, pure-Rust implementation of the X.509 path validation algorithm that TLS and other encryption and authentication protocols are built on. Our implementation is fast, standards-conforming, and memory-safe, giving the Python ecosystem a modern […]
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 […]
We at Trail of Bits perform security reviews for a seemingly endless stream of applications that use zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. While fast new arithmetization and folding libraries like Halo2, Plonky2, and Boojum are rapidly gaining adoption, Circom remains a mainstay of ZK circuit design. We’ve written about Circom safety before in the […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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.
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 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 […]
Last month, hundreds of cryptographers descended upon Tokyo for the first Real World Crypto Conference in Asia. As in previous years, we dispatched a handful of our researchers and engineers to present and attend the conference. What sets RWC apart from other conferences is that it strongly emphasizes research, collaborations, and advancements in cryptography that […]
TL;DR: We have released version 0.8.0 of Circomspect, our static analyzer and linter for Circom. Since our initial release of Circomspect in September 2022, we have added five new analysis passes, support for tags, tuples, and anonymous components, links to in-depth descriptions of each identified issue, and squashed a […]
Read the official announcement on the Sigstore blog as well! Trail of Bits is thrilled to announce the first stable release of sigstore-python, a client implementation of Sigstore that we’ve been developing for nearly a year! This work has been graciously funded by Google’s Open Source Security Team (GOSST), who we’ve also […]
Trail of Bits is publicly disclosing four vulnerabilities that affect wolfSSL: CVE-2022-38152, CVE-2022-38153, CVE-2022-39173, and CVE-2022-42905. The four issues, which have CVSS scores ranging from medium to critical, can all result in a denial of service (DoS). These vulnerabilities have been discovered automatically using the novel protocol fuzzer tlspuffin. This blog post […]
Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs are useful cryptographic tools that have seen an explosion of interest in recent years, largely due to their applications to cryptocurrency. The fundamental idea of a ZK proof is that a person with a secret piece of information (a cryptographic key, for instance) can prove something about the secret […]
Sigstore announced the general availability of its free and ecosystem-agnostic software signing service two weeks ago, giving developers a way to sign, verify and protect their software projects and the dependencies they rely on. Trail of Bits is absolutely thrilled to be a part of the project, and we spoke about our […]
In October 2019, a security researcher found a devastating vulnerability in Tornado.cash, a decentralized, non-custodial mixer on the Ethereum network. Tornado.cash uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to allow its users to privately deposit and withdraw funds. The proofs are supposed to guarantee that each withdrawal can be matched against a […]
Last week, over 500 cryptographers from around the world gathered in Amsterdam for Real World Crypto 2022, meeting in person for the first time in over two years. As in previous years, we dispatched a handful of our researchers and engineers to attend the conference, listen to talks, and schmooze observe the […]
We are open-sourcing Amarna, our new static analyzer and linter for the Cairo programming language. Cairo is a programming language powering several trading exchanges with millions of dollars in assets (such as dYdX, driven by StarkWare) and is the programming language for StarkNet contracts. But, not unlike other languages, it has its […]
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 […]
