Education

How CISA can improve OSS security

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 […]

Reusable properties for Ethereum contracts

Trail of Bits
As smart contract security constantly evolves, property-based fuzzing has become a go-to technique for developers and security engineers. This technique relies on the creation of code properties – often called invariants – which describe what the code is supposed to do. To help the community define properties, we are releasing a set of 168 pre-built […]

We’re streamers now

Trail of Bits
Over the years, we’ve built many high-impact tools that we use for security reviews. You might know some of them, like Slither, Echidna, Amarna, Tealer, and test-fuzz. All of our tools are open source, and we love seeing the community benefit from them. But mastering our tools takes time and practice, and it’s easier if […]

The Tao of Continuous Integration

Paul Kehrer
It is a truism in modern software development that a robust continuous integration (CI) system is necessary. But many projects suffer from CI that feels brittle, frustrates developers, and actively impedes development velocity. Why is this? What can you do to avoid the common CI pitfalls? Continuous Integration Needs a Purpose CI […]

Security assessment techniques for Go projects

The Trail of Bits Assurance practice has received an influx of Go projects, following the success of our Kubernetes assessment this summer. As a result, we’ve been adapting for Go projects some of the security assessment techniques and tactics we’ve used with other compiled languages. We started by understanding the design of the language, identifying […]

Plug into New York’s Infosec Community

Dan Guido
Between the city’s size and the wide spectrum of the security industry, it’s easy to feel lost. Where are ‘your people?’ How can you find talks that interest you? You want to spend your time meeting and networking, not researching your options. So, we put together a directory of all of the infosec gatherings, companies, and […]

Software Security Ideas Ahead of Their Time

Dan Guido
Every good security researcher has a well-curated list of blogs they subscribe to. At Trail of Bits, given our interest in software security and its intersections with programming languages, one of our favorites is The Programming Language Enthusiast by Michael Hicks. Our primary activity is to describe and discuss research about — and the practical […]

Why we give so much to CSAW

In just a couple of weeks, tens of thousands of students and professionals from all over the world will tune in to cheer on their favorite teams in six competitions. If you’ve been following our blog for some time, you’ll know just what we’re referring to: Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW), the nation’s largest student-run […]

Introducing the RubySec Field Guide

Dan Guido
Vulnerabilities have been discovered in Ruby applications with the potential to affect vast swathes of the Internet and attract attackers to lucrative targets online. These vulnerabilities take advantage of features and common idioms such as serialization and deserialization of data in the YAML format. Nearly all large, tested and trusted open-source Ruby projects contain some of […]

Closing the Windows Gap

Ryan Stortz
The security research community is full of grey beards that earned their stripes writing exploits against mail servers, domain controllers, and TCP/IP stacks. These researchers started writing exploits on platforms like Solaris, IRIX, and BSDi before moving on to Windows exploitation. Now they run companies, write policy, rant on twitter, and testify in front of […]

We’re Sponsoring the NYU-Poly Women’s Cybersecurity Symposium

Dan Guido
Cyber security is an increasingly complex and vibrant field that requires brilliant and driven people to work on diverse teams. Unfortunately, women are severely underrepresented and we want to change that. Career Discovery in Cyber Security is an NYU-Poly event, created in a collaboration with influential men and women in the industry. This annual symposium […]

Education Initiative Spotlight: THREADS Call for Papers

Dan Guido
A 2-day conference exploring state-of-the-art advances in security automation. We would like to share the call for papers for THREADS 2014, a research and development conference that is part of NYU-Poly’s Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW). Trail of Bits is a founding sponsor of THREADS. The final deadline for submissions is October 6th, but you […]

Education Initiative Spotlight: Build it Break it

Dan Guido
We’re proud to be a sponsor of the first Build it Break it programming contest, run by the University of Maryland (UMD) and supported by one of our own employees and PhD student at the university, Andrew Ruef. Build it Break it is a “flipped CTF” where contestants both implement secure software and identify vulnerabilities in […]

Education Initiative Spotlight: CSAW Summer Program for Women

Dan Guido
At Trail of Bits we are proud of our roots in academia and research, and we believe it is important to promote cyber security education for students of every academic level. We recently sponsored a High School Capture the Flag (CTF) event, we released a CTF Field Guide, and we are a regular part of […]