engineering-practice

Attestations: A new generation of signatures on PyPI

For the past year, we’ve worked with the Python Package Index (PyPI) on a new security feature for the Python ecosystem: index-hosted digital attestations, as specified in PEP 740. These attestations improve on traditional PGP signatures (which have been disabled on PyPI) by providing key usability, index verifiability, cryptographic strength, and provenance properties that bring […]

We build X.509 chains so you don’t have to

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 […]

Adding build provenance to Homebrew

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.

Introducing RPC Investigator

A new tool for Windows RPC research. Trail of Bits is releasing a new tool for exploring RPC clients and servers on Windows. RPC Investigator is a .NET application that builds on the NtApiDotNet platform for enumerating, decompiling/parsing and communicating with arbitrary RPC servers. We’ve added visualization and additional features that offer […]

Sinter: New user-mode security enforcement for macOS

TL;DR: Sinter is the first available open-source endpoint protection agent written entirely in Swift, with support for Apple’s new EndpointSecurity API from first principles. Sinter demonstrates how to build a successful event-authorization security agent, and incorporates solutions to many of the challenges that all endpoint protection agents will face as they migrate from kernel-mode to […]

Announcing the Zeek Agent

(This posting is cross-posted between the Zeek blog and the Trail of Bits blog). The Zeek Network Security Monitor provides a powerful open-source platform for network traffic analysis. However, from its network vantage point, Zeek lacks access to host-level semantics, such as the process and user accounts that are responsible for any connections observed. The […]

Wrapper's Delight

(University of Illinois at Chicago)
During my summer at Trail of Bits, I took full advantage of the latest C++ language features to build a new SQLite wrapper from scratch that is easy to use, lightweight, high performant, and concurrency friendly—all in under 750 lines of code.

Announcing the community-oriented osquery fork, osql

For months, Facebook has been heavily refactoring the entire osquery codebase, migrating osquery away from standard development tools like CMake and integrating it with Facebook’s internal tooling. Their intention was to improve code quality, implement additional tests, and move the project to a more modular architecture. In practice, the changes sacrificed support for a number […]

How to write a rootkit without really trying

We open-sourced a fault injection tool, KRF, that uses kernel-space syscall interception. You can use it today to find faulty assumptions (and resultant bugs) in your programs. Check it out! This post covers intercepting system calls from within the Linux kernel, via a plain old kernel module. We’ll go through a quick refresher on syscalls […]

Effortless security feature detection with Winchecksec

We’re proud to announce the release of Winchecksec, a new open-source tool that detects security features in Windows binaries. Developed to satisfy our analysis and research needs, Winchecksec aims to surpass current open-source security feature detection tools in depth, accuracy, and performance without sacrificing simplicity. Feature detection, made simple Winchecksec takes a Windows PE binary […]

Introducing windows-acl: working with ACLs in Rust

Access Control Lists (ACLs) are an integral part of the Microsoft Windows security model. In addition to controlling access to secured resources, they are also used in sandboxing, event auditing, and specifying mandatory integrity levels. They are also exceedingly painful to programmatically manipulate, especially in Rust. Today, help has arrived — we released windows-acl, a […]

Get an open-source security multiplier

An increasing number of organizations and companies (including the federal government) rely on open-source projects in their security operations architecture, secure development tools, and beyond. Open-source solutions offer numerous advantages to development-savvy teams ready to take ownership of their security challenges. Teams can implement them to provide foundational capabilities, like “process logs” or “access machine […]