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 […]
This blog showcases five examples of real-world vulnerabilities that we’ve disclosed in the past year (but have not publicly disclosed before). We also share the frustrations we faced in disclosing them to illustrate the need for effective disclosure processes. Here are the five bugs: Undefined behavior in the borsh-rs Rust library Denial-of-service […]
Have you ever wondered how a rollup and its base chain—the chain that the rollup commits state checkpoints to—communicate and interact? How can a user with funds only on the base chain interact with contracts on the rollup? In Arbitrum Nitro, one way to call a method on a contract deployed on […]
AI is becoming ubiquitous, as developers of widely used tools like GitHub and Photoshop are quickly implementing and iterating on AI-enabled features. With Microsoft’s recent integration of Copilot into Windows, AI is even on the old stalwart of computing—the desktop. The integration of an AI assistant into an entire operating system is […]
We’ve updated ZKDocs with four new sections and additions to existing content. ZKDocs provides explanations, guidance, and documentation for cryptographic protocols that are otherwise sparingly discussed but are used in practice. As such, we’ve added four new sections detailing common protocols that previously lacked implementation guidance: The Inner Product Argument (IPA), which […]
I’ve created five CodeQL queries that catch potentially potent bugs in the OpenSSL libcrypto API, a widely adopted but often unforgiving API that can be misused to cause memory leaks, authentication bypasses, and other subtle cryptographic issues in implementations. These queries—which I developed during my internship with my mentors, Fredrik Dahlgren and […]
This is a joint post with the PyPI maintainers; read their announcement here! This audit was sponsored by the Open Tech Fund as part of their larger mission to secure critical pieces of internet infrastructure. You can read the full report in our Publications repository. Late this summer, we performed an audit […]
Trail of Bits is publicly disclosing a vulnerability (CVE-2023-38596) that affects iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS before version 17, macOS before version 14, and watchOS before version 10. The flaw resides in Apple’s App Transport Security (ATS) protocol handling. We discovered that Apple’s ATS fails to require the encryption of connections to IP […]
Understanding and rigorously testing system invariants are essential aspects of developing robust smart contracts. Invariants are facts about the protocol that should remain true no matter what happens. Defining and testing these invariants allows developers to prevent the introduction of bugs and make their code more robust in the long term. However, it is difficult […]
On March 28, 2023, SafeMoon, a self-styled “community-focused DeFi token” on Binance Smart Chain, lost the equivalent of $8.9 million in Binance Coin BNB to an exploit in a liquidity pool. The exploit leveraged a simple error introduced in an upgrade to SafeMoon’s SFM token contract, allowing the attacker to burn tokens held in the […]
The aCropalypse is upon us! Last week, news about CVE-2023-21036, nicknamed the “aCropalypse,” spread across Twitter and other media, and I quickly realized that the underlying flaw could be detected by our tool, PolyTracker. I’ll explain how PolyTracker can detect files affected by the vulnerability even without specific […]
In part one of this two-part series, we escaped Webviews in real-world misconfigured VSCode extensions. But can we still escape extensions if they are well-configured? In this post, we’ll demonstrate how I bypassed a Webview’s localResourceRoots by exploiting small URL parsing differences between the browser—i.e., the Electron-created Chromium instance where VSCode and […]
Read the official announcement on the Sigstore blog as well! Trail of Bits is thrilled to announce the first stable release of sigstore-python, a client implementation of Sigstore that we’ve been developing for nearly a year! This work has been graciously funded by Google’s Open Source Security Team (GOSST), who we’ve also […]
Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs are useful cryptographic tools that have seen an explosion of interest in recent years, largely due to their applications to cryptocurrency. The fundamental idea of a ZK proof is that a person with a secret piece of information (a cryptographic key, for instance) can prove something about the secret […]
Trail of Bits recently published a blog post about a signed integer overflow in certain versions of SQLite that can enable arbitrary code execution and result in a denial of service. While working on proof-of-concept exploits for that vulnerability, we noticed that the compiler’s representation of an important integer variable is semantically […]
