eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) has emerged as the de facto Linux standard for security monitoring and endpoint observability. It is used by technologies such as BPFTrace, Cilium, Pixie, Sysdig, and Falco due to its low overhead and its versatility. There is, however, a dark (but open) secret: eBPF was never intended […]
Trail of Bits has developed a suite of open-source libraries designed to streamline the creation and deployment of eBPF applications. These libraries facilitate efficient process and network event monitoring, function tracing, kernel debug symbol parsing, and eBPF code generation. Previously, deploying portable, dependency-free eBPF applications posed significant challenges due to Linux kernel […]
During my internship at Trail of Bits, I prototyped a harness that improves the testability of the eBPF verifier, simplifying the testing of eBPF programs. My eBPF harness runs in user space, independently of any locally running kernel, and thus opens the door to testing of eBPF programs across different kernel versions. […]
Andrew Haberlandt During my summer internship at Trail of Bits, I worked on the fork of the RBPF JIT compiler that is used to execute Solana smart contracts. The RBPF JIT compiler plays a critical role on the Solana blockchain, as it facilitates the execution of contracts on validator nodes by default. Before my […]
Originally published August 11, 2021 TL;DR: These simpler, step-by-step methods equip you to apply BPF tracing technology to real-word problems—no specialized tools or libraries required. BPF, a tracing technology in the Linux kernel for network stack tracing, has become popular recently thanks to new extensions that enable novel use-cases […]
This is the second half of our blog post on the Meltdown an Spectre vulnerabilities, describing Spectre Variant 1 (V1) and Spectre Variant 2 (V2). If you have not done so already, please review the first blog post for an accessible review of computer architecture fundamentals. This blog post will start by covering the technical […]
