exploits

A retrospective on the $100M Balancer hack that occurred in November 2025, including long-term, strategic guidance on how to avoid similar bugs.

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.

A vulnerability in Electron applications allows attackers to bypass code integrity checks by tampering with V8 heap snapshot files, enabling local backdoors in applications like Signal, 1Password, and Slack.

In this blog post, we’ll detail how attackers can exploit image scaling on Gemini CLI, Vertex AI Studio, Gemini’s web and API interfaces, Google Assistant, Genspark, and other production AI systems. We’ll also explain how to mitigate and defend against these attacks, and we’ll introduce Anamorpher, our open-source tool that lets you explore and generate these crafted images.

This post traces the decade-long evolution of Ruby Marshal deserialization exploits, demonstrating how security researchers have repeatedly bypassed patches and why fundamental changes to the Ruby ecosystem are needed rather than continued patch-and-hope approaches.

Prompt injection pervades discussions about security for LLMs and AI agents. But there is little public information on how to write powerful, discreet, and reliable prompt injection exploits. In this post, we will design and implement a prompt injection exploit targeting GitHub’s Copilot Agent, with a focus on maximizing reliability and minimizing the odds of detection.

We successfully exploited two discontinued network devices at DistrictCon’s inaugural Junkyard competition in February, winning runner-up for Most Innovative Exploitation Technique. Our exploit chains demonstrate why end-of-life hardware poses persistent security risks.

This post describes a sophisticated social engineering campaign using Zoom’s remote control feature and provides technical solutions to protect organizations against this attack vector.

We identified 10 security vulnerabilities within the caddy-security plugin for the Caddy web server that could enable a variety of high-severity attacks in web applications, including client-side code execution, OAuth replay attacks, and unauthorized access to resources. During our evaluation, Caddy was deployed as a reverse proxy […]

TL;DR: This two-part blog series will cover how I found and disclosed three vulnerabilities in VSCode extensions and one vulnerability in VSCode itself (a security mitigation bypass assigned CVE-2022-41042 and awarded a $7,500 bounty). We will identify the underlying cause of each vulnerability and create fully working exploits to demonstrate how an […]

I discovered a logic bug in the readline dependency that partially reveals file information when parsing the file specified in the INPUTRC environment variable. This could allow attackers to move laterally on a box where sshd is running, a given user is able to login, and the user’s private key […]

To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus. (Macbeth: 3.1) It’s not enough that compilers generate efficient code, they must also generate safe code. Despite the extensive testing and correctness certification that goes into developing compilers and their optimization passes, they may inadvertently introduce information leaks […]

Many machine learning (ML) models are Python pickle files under the hood, and it makes sense. The use of pickling conserves memory, enables start-and-stop model training, and makes trained models portable (and, thereby, shareable). Pickling is easy to implement, is built into Python without requiring additional dependencies, and supports serialization of custom […]

On December 3rd, Aave deployed version 2 of their codebase. While we were not hired to look at the code, we briefly reviewed it the following day. We quickly discovered a vulnerability that affected versions 1 and 2 of the live contracts and reported the issue. Within an hour of sending our analysis to Aave, […]

After writing Go for years, many of us have learned the error-checking pattern down to our bones: “Does this function return an error? Ope, better make sure it’s nil before moving on.” And that’s great! This should be our default behavior when writing Go. However, rote error checking can sometimes prevent critical thinking about what […]

The initial release of yVault contained logic for computing the price of yUSDC that could be manipulated by an attacker to drain most (if not all) of the pool’s assets. Fortunately, Andre, the developer, reacted incredibly quickly and disabled the faulty code, securing the approximately 400,000 USD held at the time. However, this bug still […]

It’s been four years since my blog post “2000 cuts with Binary Ninja.” Back then, Binary Ninja was in a private beta and the blog post response surprised its developers at Vector35. Over the past few years I’ve largely preferred to use IDA and HexRays for reversing, and then use Binary Ninja for any scripting. […]

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) contract recently suffered from a critical bug that prompted a security advisory and a migration to a new contract (CVE-2020-5232). ENS allows users to associate online resources with human-readable names. As you might expect, it allows you to transfer and sell domain names. Specific details about the bug were in […]

On Tuesday, the NSA announced they had found a critical vulnerability in the certificate validation functionality on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016/2019. This bug allows attackers to break the validation of trust in a wide variety of contexts, such as HTTPS and code signing. Concerned? Get the important details and see if you’re vulnerable […]

Earlier today, a new iPhone Boot ROM exploit, checkm8 (or Apollo or Moonshine), was published on GitHub by axi0mX, affecting the iPhone 4S through the iPhone X. The vulnerability was patched in devices with A12 and A13 CPUs. As of this writing, the iPhone XS, XS Max, XR, 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max […]

Trail of Bits recently completed a security assessment of Kubernetes, including its interaction with Docker. Felix Wilhelm’s recent tweet of a Proof of Concept (PoC) “container escape” sparked our interest, since we performed similar research and were curious how this PoC could impact Kubernetes. Quick and dirty way to get out of a privileged k8s […]

A denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability, dubbed ‘Gridlock,’ was publicly reported on July 1st in one of Edgeware’s smart contracts deployed on Ethereum. As much as $900 million worth of Ether may have been processed by this contract. Edgeware has since acknowledged and fixed the “fatal bug.” When we heard about Gridlock, we ran Slither on the […]

Let’s automatically identify weird machines in software. Combating software exploitation has been a cat-and-mouse game ever since the Morris worm in 1988. Attackers use specific exploitation primitives to achieve unintended code execution. Major software vendors introduce exploit mitigation to break those primitives. Back and forth, back and forth. The mitigations have certainly raised the bar […]

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 […]

Two weeks ago, we were engaged by CTS Labs as independent consultants at our standard consulting rates to review and confirm the technical accuracy of their preliminary findings. We participated neither in their research nor in their subsequent disclosure process. Our recommendation to CTS was to disclose the vulnerabilities through a CERT. Our review of […]