At Trail of Bits we do more than just security audits: We also push the boundaries of research in vulnerability detection tools, regularly present our work in academic conferences, and review interesting papers from other researchers (see our recent Real World Crypto and Financial Crypto recaps). In this spirit, we and Northern Arizona University are […]
How quickly can we use brute force to guess a 64-bit number? The short answer is, it all depends on what resources are available. So we’re going to examine this problem starting with the most naive approach and then expand to other techniques involving parallelization. We’ll discuss parallelization at the CPU level with SIMD instructions, […]
At Trail of Bits, we make a significant effort to stay up to date with the academic world. We frequently evaluate our work through peer-reviewed conferences, and we love to attend academic events (see our recent ICSE and Crypto recaps). However, we consistently see one recurring issue at these academic events: a lack of reliable […]
Imagine reducing the amount of code and time needed to test software, while at the same time increasing the efficacy of your tests and making your debugging tasks easier—all with minimal human effort. It seems too good to be true, but we’re going to explain how test-case reduction can do all this (and maybe more). […]
Parsing is hard, even when a file format is well specified. But when the specification is ambiguous, it leads to unintended and strange parser and interpreter behaviors that make file formats susceptible to security vulnerabilities. What if we could automatically generate a “safe” subset of any file format, along with an associated, verified parser? That’s […]
Have you ever tried using LLVM’s X-Ray profiling tools to make some flame graphs, but gotten obscure errors like: ==65892==Unable to determine CPU frequency for TSC accounting. ==65892==Unable to determine CPU frequency. Or worse, have you profiled every function in an application, only to find the sum of all function runtimes accounted for ~15 minutes […]
Earlier this week, Manticore leapt forward to version 0.3.0. Advances for our symbolic execution engine now include: “fast forwarding” through concrete execution that you don’t care about, support for Linux binaries statically compiled for AArch64, and an interface for selectively solving for interesting test cases. We’ve been working really hard on these and other features […]
Fuzzing is a great way to find bugs in software, but many developers don’t use it. We hope to change that today with the release of Sienna Locomotive, a new open-source fuzzer for Windows that emphasizes usability. Sienna Locomotive aims to make fuzzing accessible to developers with limited security expertise. Its user-oriented features make it […]
Trying to make a living as a programmer participating in bug bounties is the same as convincing yourself that you’re good enough at Texas Hold ‘Em to quit your job. There’s data to back this up in Fixing a Hole: The Labor Market for Bugs, a chapter in New Solutions for Cybersecurity, by Ryan Ellis, […]
